Hope and Gravity – February 27 – March 1 – Comedy
When an elevator plummets in a major city, nine lives collide in unexpected, often comic—and sometimes heartbreaking—ways. Their connections ripple through offices, living rooms, and hotel suites; through love affairs and dental appointments, poetry readings and private doubts.
Jill pines for Steve, who’s engaged to Barb, who has a fling with Peter, who’s already entangled with Nan, who’s married to Marty, an avid reader of Elevator World. Elsewhere, nine floors above the chaos, Douglas meets Tanya—who hopes to conceive with Hal—and a small, unlikely miracle quietly changes hands.
By turns hilarious and deeply moving, Hope and Gravity follows the delicate, nearly invisible threads that bind strangers, lovers, and dreamers together.
St. Gregory the Great Auditorium – Knoxville Catholic High School
9245 Fox Lonas Road, Knoxville
Decoration Day – May 15-31 – Drama
World Premiere
On Decoration Day in East Tennessee, Kate Hughes and her aunt June clean the Rankin cemetery and remember their dead. Kate recently lost her mother, Cordie, whose memories haunt the day. Years earlier, Kate and Cordie left after Boyd Hughes—Kate’s father—went to prison for attacking a preacher. Boyd returns home with a troubled past, marked by a childhood drowning that divided the Rankin and Hughes families.
As Boyd’s plans with his friend Nickel unravel, long-buried secrets surface. Guided by June, Kate must confront her parents’ history and the meaning of family, home, and tradition amid the cemetery’s lingering shadows.
Playhouse at Borderlands
802 Sevier Avenue, Knoxville
Animal Farm – OCTOBER 23-25 – Comedic Drama
Dramatic Reading
Animal Farm is a fable with a sting. Much has been written about the threat of Communism, but it remained to the late George Orwell, farsighted British author of the brilliant and frightening 1984, to expose the Russian experiment for what it really is: an idealist’s dream, converted by realists into a nightmare. In staged dramatic reading version of this timely allegory, you will meet beasts whose prototypes have dominated news headlines for many fearful years. Opening on a note of joyous triumph for the creatures who have emancipated themselves from the cruel mastery of a human owner, the reading mounts inexorably to a climax of disillusionment in which the other animals discover themselves now subject to the rule of even more ruthless autocrats: the greedy, cunning pigs. Intermingling humor and drama, Animal Farm wrings the emotions of its listeners, leaving audiences shaken with the tale of a tragedy that happened in a mythical barnyard far away but could happen in our own back yard.
Historic Grove Theater
123 Randolph Road
Oak Ridge, TN