Past Productions
We are committed to producing purposeful, challenging, and unique theater experiences including the best of contemporary drama, exciting new works, plays for young audiences, and boldly reimagined classics.
2025-2026
Mt. Airy Home Companion: Give Me Liberty
A comedic radio play with the Companion crew as they reflect on and respond to the 250th anniversary of the United States of America!
The “N” Crowd Comedy Show
The N Crowd is a long-standing, top-notch improv comedy team. With over 1,200 performances under their belt and appearances at festivals throughout the East Coast, they offer an entirely unscripted, audience-driven experience using popular and unique improv games.
Guthrie Ramsey
Taking inspiration from the meditative phrase, “The Sound of History”, Dr. Ramsey has curated a selection of ancestral music that will make you sway, bop, groove, and fall in love with the ways in which music captures our history while propelling us forward.
The Lost Priest
Written and performed by Gabe Seplow
A deeply introspective and poetic one-person play follows the contemplative journey of the titled role, Lost Priest, who navigates themes of faith, identity, memory, and cultural inheritance. Rooted in Jewish traditions and rituals, the play delves into the protagonist’s conflicted relationship with their heritage, examining moments of pride, doubt, and discovery. Through fragmented reflections, the Lost Priest grapples with familial history, the weight of antisemitism, and the search for meaning in religious rituals that once felt familiar but now seem distant.
Winter Resurgence Cabaret
A night of riveting cabaret-style musical theater. Performed by Philly’s best and brightest, this is a tribute to community, kindness, and camaraderie in the cold season.
Little Lives featuring Miles Orion Butler
An evening concert featuring the gorgeous vocals and acoustic guitar stylings of Philadelphia musician and Germantown jewel, Miles Orion Butler.
Yes! And… Collaborative Arts: Theater for Youth Show!
A theater for youth showcase catered to children by Yes! And… Collaborative Arts.
Jazzentine 2026 featuring Khadijah “Renee”
An evening concert celebrating the season of love with jazz songstress, Khadijah “Renee”.
Sis.tem | Gateways to Safehouses
A duet of dance, confronting the public scrutiny that Black women face now and in our not-so-distant past. We are worked until wrung dry, leaving us questioning our worth, privilege, and role in the grand scheme of it all.
Readers Theater: Recuerdos Que No Sabias Que Tenias
Written by Mars Santi
An exploration of memory + wisdom moved from generation to generation. Encapsulating Boricua culture, queerness, familial joy, reclamation + healing towards liberation. Recuerdos Que No Sabias Que Tenias is a living breathing archive protecting our most cherished possessions – memories, stories, + our spirits.
Brandon Moulden
Brandon Evan Moulden is a singer-songwriter, song stylist and poet of substance and eclecticism. Rooted in the jazz idiom, soul influence, and pop sounds of old and new, his voice and music captivate with the ability to place both the lyric and the listener in a bed of thought and emotion.
Don’t Sing Me No Blues
Written by Glenn Alan
Directed by Zurhairah McGill
Max’s Barbershop is more than a place for a cut—it’s where stories are shared, friendly bets are placed, dreams take shape, and brotherhood runs deep.
In Glenn Alan’s compelling dramatic comedy, the atmosphere shifts when one of the town’s most beloved women passes away. Whispers begin to circulate about her estranged son, Choice, who has fled the law and returned to town.
2023-2024
The Karen Smith Experience
Karen Smith Experience, featuring Colin Myers on keyboard, Ikechi Onyenaka on sax, Sweet Corey Bey on bass, and percussionist Karen “Magic Fingaz” Smith with special guest Spoken Word Artist, Fe Fe Love.
Reader’s Theater: Black Roses in the Garden
Written by Camille E. James
1970s – Harlem – during the second wave of Women’s Rights. This play gives the podium to the hidden voices of Black queer women who expressed their ideas, desires, and pleasures in a now dwindling lesbian bar culture. In a hidden, dank, dimly lit bar, we join four women on a journey of laughter, determination, and courage in love and sisterhood that feeds them at the root.
Jazzentine’s Concert with the Robert Boyd Jr. Quintet
A beautiful celebration of love with jazz, cabaret style, from Robert Boyd on saxophone, João on piano, Tim Ragsdale on bass, Wayne Smith Jr. on drums, and Z on vocals.
Funny Gals: Dirty Old Town Comedy Showcase
Hosted by Anna Gallagher
Featuring: Finessica, Peggy O’Leary, Rachel Fogletto, and Emily Epstein White
Celebrating all things funny and fem with an all-female line-up of Philly’s favorite comedians.
Dr. Sketchy’s Art is Magic
Directed by Candy Mayhem
With model & magician, Lindsey Noel
Dr. Sketchy’s is the world’s premier alternative drawing movement. Artists gather in over a hundred cities (including New York, London, Las Vegas, and Tokyo) to sketch glamorous, subcultural models and compete in drawing contests in an atmosphere of artistic calamity.
The Trouble with Harry
Directed by Noël Butcher Hanley
With model & magician, Lindsey Noel
Blackburn Theatrical Productions in partnership with Allens Lane Art Center presents the world premiere of the theatre adaptation of The Trouble With Harry, the 1950 novel written by Jack Trevor Story, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name.
A group of townspeople pull together to help each other deal with a mysterious crime, bury (and re-bury) a body, and throw the police off the scent of any wrongdoing–all the while learning about one another and themselves. A quirky and heartfelt tale of acceptance and redemption, watch hope bloom within the hearts of an unlikely group of individuals as they collectively pursue the truth about Harry.
Reader’s Theater: Eve In Paradise
Written by Megan Edelman
Eve in Paradise is an adaptation and a memoir. Eve is a biblical troublemaker, a seventeenth-century puritanical ideal, and a 21st-century intersectional feminist, who has lost her faith. The audience finds Eve embodying Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and cutting it with scenes from her own life. As she grapples with the original text, she shares her journey as a child of the catechism, a questioning teenager, and an adult who strives to find the beauty not in God, but in humanity.
Motherly Love Cabaret
Directed by Jennie Eisenhower
Barrymore award winner Jennie Eisenhower directs a cast of veteran Philadelphia theatre artists as they explore the ups, downs, ins and outs of motherhood through songs and stories.
Enchantment Theatre Company: The Brave Little Tailor
The Tailor is not brawny, but he is certainly brainy, and his cleverness gets him out of several sticky situations. Tailor falls in love with the Princess (who is the true hero of the story – she may even slay the dragon) and outsmart a pair of goofy giants, a wild rhinoceros, and even the King. The power of honesty and accepting yourself brings ultimate happiness to the Tailor.
2021-2022
The Secretaries
By The Five Lesbian Brothers
Directed by Josh Hitchens
Patty Johnson is thrilled to join the secretarial pool at the Cooney Lumber Mill, but she soon begins to feel that all is not right – lumberjacks keep disappearing and the secretaries might be a cult!.
Dearly Departed
By David Bottrell and Jessie Jones
Directed by Dakota Adams
In the Baptist backwoods of the Bible Belt, the beleaguered Turpin family proves that living and dying in the South are seldom tidy and always hilarious.
Real Women Have Curves
by Josefina Lopez
Directed by Mark Branche
Set in a tiny sewing factory in East L.A., five full-figured Mexican-American women race to meet nearly impossible production deadlines in order to keep their business from going under.
Life Sucks
By Aaron Posner
Directed by Robert Bauer
In this brash reworking of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a group of old friends, ex-lovers, estranged in-laws, and lifelong enemies gather to grapple with life’s thorniest questions—and each other.
2020-2021
Eurydice
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Shannon Hill
Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love in this reimagining of a classic Greek myth.
Deathtrap
By Ira Levin
Directed by Ryan Walter
Sidney Bruhl, a successful writer of Broadway thrillers, is struggling to overcome a dry spell when he receives a script from a student that could be good enough to kill for.
The Weir
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Josh Hitchens
In a bar in rural Ireland, the local men swap spooky stories in an attempt to impress a young woman from Dublin who recently moved into a nearby “haunted” house.
A Body of Water
By Lee Blessing
Directed by Robert Bauer
Moss and Avis, a middle-aged couple, wake up one morning in an isolated summer house high above a picturesque body of water – and neither of them can remember who they are.
2019-2020
The Insanity of Mary Girard
By Lanie Robertson
Directed by Mariangela Saavedra
In this haunting and highly theatrical piece, Mary Girard, committed to an insane asylum in 1790, envisions dancing “furies” who impersonate people from her past.
Stop Kiss
By Diana Son
Directed by Leigh Jacobs & Lauri Jacobs
After Callie meets Sara, the two unexpectedly fall in love and their first kiss provokes a violent attack that transforms their lives in a way they could never anticipate.
The Philadelphia Story
By Philip Barry
Directed by Noel Hanley
This smash Broadway comedy, about an eventful wedding weekend at the estate of a wealthy American family, inspired an Oscar-winning film and the hit musical High Society.
Keely and Du
By Jane Martin
Directed by Scott Grumling & T. Patrick Ryan
Du, a right-to-life activist, and Keely, a pregnant rape victim Du is confining, transcend their circumstances and the ideological issues that separate them.
2018-2019
The Country
By Martin Crimp
Directed by Robert Bauer
Richard and his wife Corinne have moved to the country to start a new life, but with the arrival of an unexpected visitor It gradually emerges that all is not as it seems.
Sabrina Fair
By Samuel Taylor
Directed by Noel Hanley
This version of the Cinderella fable is set on Long Island in the 1950s, and deals with the involvement of a very rich family with Sabrina Fairchild, the daughter of their chauffeur.
Over the River and Through the Woods
By Joe DiPietro
Directed by Marilyn Yoblick
A hilarious family comedy centered around Nick, a single Italian-American guy from New Jersey who has to tell his grandparents he has a dream job offer in Seattle – and the news doesn’t sit so well.
26 Pebbles
By Eric Ulloa
Directed by Scott Grumling & T. Patrick Ryan
This play, based on interviews conducted with the community of Newtown, Connecticut, explores the devastating ramifications of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged)
By Adam Long, Reed Martin, & Austin Tichenor
Directed by Mariangela Saavedra
An affectionate, irreverent roller-coaster ride from fig leaves to Final Judgment – Whether you’re spiritually inclined or not you will be tickled by this romp through old-time religion.
2017-2018
The Grapes of Wrath
By Frank Galati
Directed by Josh Hitchens
Reduced to poverty by the loss of their farm, the Joad family piles their few possessions on a battered old truck and head west for California, hoping to find work and a better life.
Rasheeda Speaking
By Joel Drake Johnson
Directed by Scott Grumling & T. Patrick Ryan
This tense workplace thriller examines the realities of so-called “post-racial” when two co-workers—one black, the other white—are driven apart by the machinations of their boss.
You Can’t Take It With You
By George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart
Directed by Noel Hanley
One of the most popular and successful plays of modern times, You Can’t Take It With You is Kaufman and Hart’s hilarious, delightful portrait of a charmingly eccentric family.
The Most Deserving
By Catherine Trieschmann
Directed by Nancy Kreider
In this comedy about gossip, politics, and opinions about art, a small town arts council has $20,000 to award to a local artist with an “under-represented American voice” and must decide who gets it
I Hate Hamlet
By Paul Rudnick
Directed by Mariangela Saavedra
A young and successful television actor relocates to New York to play Hamlet – a role and play he hates – and is surprised to find himself haunted by the intoxicated ghost of John Barrymore!
2016-2017
Rapture, Blister, Burn
By Gina Gionffrido
Directed by Maurizio Giammarco
After grad school, Catherine and Gwen chose polar opposite paths, but decades later, unfulfilled in polar opposite ways, each woman covets the other’s life.
Rumors
By Neil Simon
Directed by Noel Hanley
When they gather to celebrate a tenth wedding anniversary, four New York power couples experience confusions and miscommunications that drive them into farcical hilarity.
And Then There Were None
By Agatha Christie
Directed by Josh Hitchens
Ten strangers with wicked secrets are summoned to a remote island, and as the weather turns bad they are murdered one by one in accordance with the lines of a sinister nursery rhyme.
An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein
By Shel Silverstein
Directed by Mariangela Saavedra
These ten short plays welcome you to the darkly comic world of Shel Silverstein, where nothing is as it seems and where the most innocent conversation can turn menacing in an instant.
Betrayal
By Harold Pinter
Directed by Robert Bauer
The play begins with the meeting of Emma and Jerry, whose adulterous affair of seven years ended two years earlier – and then each scene moves backward in time up to the affair’s beginning.
Community Voices
In 2020 and 2021, Allens Lane Art Center presented Community Voices, a series of one night, interactive talks by people within our Philadelphia Community.
Watch Past Events:
October 2021, Authors and Storytellers
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April 2021, Local Radio and Musicians
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March 2021, Locally Owned Businesses
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February 2021, Historic Germantown
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October 2020, Sisters in Music and Poetry
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