Welcome to Season 27 at Company One Theatre!
As Boston’s Theatre for the People, it is vital that our work speaks to the lives, struggles, and dreams of our community members. Here at C1, the people are central to everything we do:
We center deep, reciprocal local partnerships in our process because community is not a marketing demographic, it’s our co-creator.
We prioritize investment in our staff and artists because creativity thrives when people are nurtured, not commodified.
We commit to Pay-What-You-Want public programming because transformative art that challenges the status quo should be accessible to everyone.
We champion stories that remind our audiences, artists, and students that we have the power, agency, and collective capacity to change the world.
C1’s work — whether onstage, in the classroom, or out in our neighborhoods — will continue to be intergenerational, multiracial, and intersectional, and our resolve to amplify our values loudly and proudly is stronger than ever.
This season, we are showcasing three powerful plays by women of color that represent the future of the field and examine our country’s complex relationship to history, liberation, and justice. These productions interrogate how our nation has struggled to forge a more perfect union, and uplift the ways that everyday people across generations have endeavored to expand the definition of equity and imagine a Better Future that reflects the true promise of liberty and justice for all. These stories are a critical reminder of how far we’ve come, and an urgent call to action to hold fast to that progress despite the systems of oppression that we face today.
We all, as individuals and as a community, have a responsibility to take on the mantle of progress. We, the C1 community, are recommitting to who we are, how we work, and why our mission is so vital.
Let’s build a Better Future together. By the people. For the people.
— The C1 Team
SEASON 27 PRODUCTIONS
The Great Privation
(How to flip ten cents into a dollar)
a new play by Nia Akilah Robinson
directed by Mina Morita
dramaturgy by Sonia Fernandez
a co-production with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
January 9-31, 2026
The Modern Theatre at Suffolk University
All tickets are Pay-What-You-Want ($0 minimum)
Charity and her mom both work as counselors at a sleepaway camp in Philadelphia. On the same grounds, almost two centuries earlier, a strangely familiar mother and daughter stand watch at the grave of a recently deceased loved one. As betrayals and buried horrors come to light, love holds fast across twisting timelines.
The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) is a darkly comic play which asks: how do we go on living with a history we cannot change?
Why This Play Now?
Set in 1832 and the present day, The Great Privation asks us to examine our country’s complex racial history through the parallel stories of a mother and daughter, who each embody the roles of both ancestor and descendant. This play interrogates our nation’s long practice of harming Black bodies in the name of progress, and demonstrates the necessity of joy as a form of resistance to racial violence and injustice.
You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!
a new play by Keiko Green
directed by Shawn LaCount
dramaturgy by Jessie Baxter
produced in partnership with Boston Public Library
March 6-28, 2026
Boston Public Library, Central Library in Copley Square
All tickets are Pay-What-You-Want ($0 minimum)
Come one, come all to a sparkling celebration of life, death, and cosmic connection! When Greg receives a terminal cancer diagnosis (and weird dream visitations from Greta Thunberg), he finally understands his true purpose and races to save Mother Earth as climate catastrophe looms. Meanwhile, Viv tries to hold it all together, but really just wants to stop time and hide under the covers with her husband. And through it all, our emcee, M, charts their own path while Dad is dying, life is a drag, and the world keeps spinning.
You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! proves that every family is their own ecosystem, as complex and beautiful as the Earth itself.
Why This Play Now?
This irreverent, laugh-out-loud experience speaks to the very real stakes of climate anxiety and grief without dwelling in hopelessness. You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World opens opportunities to talk about climate activism in both global and hyperlocal ways, as well as how we support those we love through heartache and death.
A New Era
a world premiere by Miranda Austen ADEkoje
directed by Summer L. Williams
July 17 – August 8, 2026
The Strand Theatre
All tickets are Pay-What-You-Want ($0 minimum)
Journeying across a divided America, seven formidable women gather right here in Boston for an unprecedented national conference. With liberation and Black Lives at stake, can they get in formation, navigate their political differences, and organize together to criminalize lynching? The year might be 1895, but the fight is very much our own.
A real-life story of politics, passion, and perseverance, A New Era is a powerful celebration of Boston’s Black suffragist movement and a call to build upon that legacy today.
Why This Play Now?
Just in time for America’s 250th birthday, A New Era centers on the critical role Black women have played in the fight for civil rights, abolition, and Black liberty. Black women continually push movements forward, yet remain largely obscured in American history books due to both racism and sexism. A New Era celebrates a transformative part of Black history hosted right here in our city, and demonstrates the importance of organizing and strategizing toward collective liberation.
THE C1 EXPERIENCE
YOUR PLAYS, YOUR PRICE.
All of our plays and events are fully Pay-What-You-Want. Whether that’s productions, New Work or Connectivity events, or our Professional Development for Actors showcase, this means that anyone can become part of our community for free, making space for those who have systemically been made to feel like they are not welcome in theatrical spaces.
DIG DEEP INTO EACH SHOW.
C1 curates a constellation of engagement opportunities around each production, including post-show conversations with artists and partners, lobby activations, pop-up performances, workshops, weekday matinees, curriculum guides, and Teen Night Out pre-show gatherings designed by teens, for teens.
NEW STORIES, NEW STORYTELLERS.
AMPLIFYING ACTION.
C1 provides opportunities for audiences to take action through deep partnerships with local organizations whose work amplifies the themes of our plays and events. We’ve teamed up with over 200 social justice organizations that serve and represent every neighborhood in Boston. Plus, C1’s teaching artists will instruct over 1,000 students through 24 in-school residencies — up from 15 in Season 26 — across Boston, Braintree, Brookline, Lynn, Newton, Watertown, and Worcester. (edited)
Photos by Annielly Camargo, Lauren Miller, and Ken Yotsukura.