Fall Play Reading Series

A Streetcar Named Desire
Friday, October 16, 2026, 7:30pm
by Tennessee Williams

Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans with a trunk of costume jewellery, a fading reputation, and nowhere else to go. Her sister Stella has a two-room flat, a baby coming, and a husband, Stanley Kowalski, who can smell a lie from across the room.

The 1947 premiere made a star of Marlon Brando opposite Jessica Tandy's Blanche, and won the Pulitzer Prize; Vivien Leigh took the role on film and an Academy Award with it. Nearly eighty years on, the play has only sharpened: a woman's account of what happened to her, weighed against a man's, by the one person who can't afford to believe her.

In this setting there is nothing between you and this iconic, classic script, our Firehall Theatre at its most intimate.

The Sound Inside
Friday, November 20, 2026, 7:30pm
by Adam Rapp

Bella Baird, an isolated and fiercely intelligent creative writing professor at Yale, receives a life-altering diagnosis just as an enigmatic young student, Christopher, enters her world. What begins as an unusual mentorship soon develops into an intense and deeply personal connection, bound together by literature, loneliness, and the stories we tell ourselves.

As Christopher shares a mysterious new novella and Bella becomes increasingly invested in its creation, the boundaries between teacher and student, fiction and reality, and life and death begin to blur. Bella makes a startling request of Christopher. One that forces them both to confront just how far one person can ask another to go.

Suspenseful and intimate, The Sound Inside explores the stories we create when reality becomes difficult to face, and whether fiction can sometimes give us the courage to keep living.

This play was nominated for 6 Tony Awards in 2020, including Best Play.

Content Advisory: The Sound Inside deals with mature and potentially sensitive subject matter, including cancer and terminal illness, suicide and assisted suicide, mortality, and emotional distress. The play also contains references to sexual activity and coarse language.