Archives
Past Shows & Readings
Staged Reading
A reading in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center
The Last Night of Ballyhoo
By Alfred Uhry
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Leigh Akin, Marley Bauer, Cristyn Chandler, Fred Harlow, Salomon Maya, Liliana Talwatte & Debra Wanger
Alfred Uhry’s dark comedy examines the inner workings of the South’s finest Jewish families in 1939, as Gone With the Wind is enjoying its world premier and Hitler is invading Poland. However, this upper class German-Jewish community is more concerned with who is attending the formal ball, Ballyhoo. Hilarity ensues as these families are forced to confront their intra-ethnic bias.
Mainstage Production Show
Hand To God
By Robert Askins
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Rebecca Crigler, Adam Daniel, Sam Ginn, Dave Rivas & Devin Wade
From reading to production, The Roustabout Theatre Co. is bringing the blazing comedic explosion, Hand to God to its main stage! See the Sunday School hand puppet come to life and take over a shy student and wreak havoc on his world. While tackling big and serious life themes, this play is balanced by dirty, foul-mouthed, provocative, cover-your-ears kind of humor — it’s been called the “funniest play ever produced on Broadway.”
Second Stage Reading Series
The Year of Magical Thinking
"This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you…” Joan Didion’s best-selling memoir about the sudden loss of her husband and daughter is brought to life in this stunning and powerful one-woman show that the New York Times called “an indelible portrait of loss and grief.” An uplifting, arresting and powerful drama that explores the question: how does the soul process grief and loss?
Second Stage Reading Series
Stones In His Pocket
By Marie Jones
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Chris Braden, Adam Daniels, Sam Ginn, David McBean, & Wendy Waddell
Pairs of actors rotate each night, portraying a total of 13 characters between them, to tell the hilarious story of what happens when a Hollywood film studio descends upon a rural Ireland town to film an epic blockbuster, and when a young man’s unexpected fall turns everything upside-down. This quintessentially Irish story is witty, charming, and heartwarming all at once. A play that explores and explodes the bounds of comedy and drama, of pathos and whimsy, of heartstring and funny bone. And who better to bring this captivating story to the stage than some of San Diego's finest clowns?
Second Stage Reading Series
A reading in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center
Watch On The Rhine
By Lillian Hellman
Directed by Jacquelyn Ritz & Phil Johnson
Featuring Grace Delaney, Vanessa Dinning, Layth Haddad, Joey Landwehr, Eddy Lukovic, Carla Navarro, Andrew Oswald, Caroline Ritz Daugherty, Eben Rosenzweig & Wendy Waddell
Watch on the Rhine is set in late spring 1940 in Washington, D.C. It follows a German-born, anti-fascist man, his American wife, and their three children who find themselves visiting wealthy relatives since fleeing Europe seeking peace but find they have not come here alone. War, fascism, and espionage are all exposed in this three-act drama that evolves into an intense thriller.
Main Stage Production
The Savoyard Murders
By Omri Schein
Directed by Omri Schein & Phil Johnson
Featuring Eliott Goretsky, Taylor Henderson, Phil Johnson, David McBean, Durwood Murray, Daren Scott & Wendy Waddell
An outrageous group of theater people is trapped in a luxurious Edwardian mansion for hours on end only to find one deliciously murdered, one a diabolical suspect. Full-tilt personalities tortured by their own foibles are done away with by each fashionable other. Premiering its onstage debut, The Savoyard Murders is full of over-the-top, scandalous drama that ensues — the perfect ingredients for a hilarious murder mystery that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Second Stage Reading Series
True West
By Sam Shepard
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring David McBean, Jason Maddy, Richard Trujillo, Sue Boland & Dianne Yvette
Austin is an intelligent, ivy-league screenwriter – his unpredictable brother Lee is a con artist and petty thief. Austin is battling writer’s block when these two estranged brothers meet in their mother’s desert home. The pressure rises as the brothers slowly draw closer, as if being sucked into an inevitable black hole. The past is recalled, old grudges recounted, and typewriters are smashed right on stage. A wild, funny, and brooding classic story of conflict, True West has been called Sam Shephard’s “masterwork” and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983.
Second Stage Reading Series
A reading in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center
Enter Laughing
By Joseph Stein
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Scott Striegel, Alex Guzman, Durwood Murray, Rin Ehlers Sheldon, Phil Johnson, Daren Scott, Jessica John, D. Candis Paule, Eliott Goretsky, Leigh Akin, Scott Striegel & Jason Heil
A sidesplitting adaptation of the semi-autobiographical Carl Reiner novel. David Kolowitz (Reiner) is a sewing machine delivery boy who has his eyes set on theatrical stardom. His parents want him to become a druggist, but he defies them and leaves their dreams behind to be cast as the leading man in a third-rate theater company’s production. Culminating in a hilarious first performance where everything that can go wrong, does! This uproarious show is brought to life as only The Roustabouts can!
Second Stage Reading Series
Dead Man’s Cell Phone
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Sandy Campbell, Jason Maddy, Thomas Edward Daugherty, Vicky Dawson, Leigh Akin, Yolanda Franklin & Mikaela Macias
An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café, a stranger at the next table who has had enough, and a dead man with a lot of loose ends…so begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone. A wildly imaginative new comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl. A work about how we memorialize the dead and how that remembering changes us. It is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a tech-obsessed world.
Main Stage Production
gUnTOPIA
By Will Cooper
Featuring Phil Johnson, Katie Karel, Walter Murray, Veronica Burgess, Elena Bertacchi & Eben Rosenzweig
Directed by Rosina Reynolds & Kate Rose Reynolds
The Nelsons are a model family and all of them are excellent shots. They attend the range every Sunday. Faithfully. It’s a wonderful world. They live with dogs, friendly neighbors, and neatly trimmed lawns. Safe inside their normal lives all is as well as it can be...or is it? gUnTOPIA is a biting new satire not to be missed.
This was a full remount of TRTC Founding Member Will Cooper’s brilliant play that was shut down by the pandemic in March 2020.
Second Stage Reading Series
Celebration of New Writers
Directed by Matthew Salazar-Thompson
San Diego has a diverse and underrepresented pool of talented playwrights. Part of our mission is to produce new works. TRTC is dedicated to providing experiences and opportunities for artists and diverse audiences, both onstage and off.
Our evening of writers includes short new pieces with a discussion afterward. Our team brings together local talents in the best light, to introduce you to the next artistic wave.
JPlays with The Roustabouts
The Little Foxes
By Lillian Hellman
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Shana Wride, Sandy Campbell, Andrew Oswald, Fred Harlow, Matthew Salazar-Thomson, Hayden Emmerson, Walter Murray, Catalina Zelles & Vanessa Dinning
Continuing with the mission of highlighting great Jewish theatre writers of the 20th century, The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman is a drama that grapples with the themes of greed, betrayal, and corruption, set against the backdrop of the post-Civil War south.
Second Stage Reading Series
This Land is My Land
Written & Directed by Matthew Salazar-Thompson
Featuring San Diego’s own Herb Siguenza with Allison Spratt Pearce & Laura Odette Sandoval
An aging woman leaves her estate to her closest friend creating a cavalcade of opinions and questions regarding culture, racism, and ownership of identity.
Second Stage Reading Series
Hand to God
By Robert Askins
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Adam Daniel, Rebecca Crigler, Durwood Murray, Devin Wade, Sam Ginn & David McBean
One of the most hilarious plays ever produced. After his father’s death, meek Jason finds an outlet for his anxiety at the Christian Puppet Ministry, in the devoutly religious, relatively quiet small town of Cypress, Texas. Jason’s puppet, Tyrone, takes on a shocking and dangerously irreverent personality all its own. Hand to God explores the startlingly fragile nature of faith, morality, and the ties that bind us.
Second Stage Reading Series
Ripcord
By David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring John DeCarlo, Samantha Ginn, Connie Jackson, Ron Christopher Jones, Durwood Murray, Daren Scott & Holly Stephenson
A raucous, odd pairing of two entirely different older women in assisted living as they embark upon increasingly emotionally and physically dangerous tricks in order to break each other for a better hospital bed. Secrets are revealed, lives are jeopardized, and peach cobbler is enjoyed. It’s an often slapstick, always surprising comedy, an enemies-to-friends story.
Main Stage Production
Iron
By Rona Munro
Directed by Jacole Kitchen
Starring Rosina Reynold & Kate Rose Reynolds
Featuring Richard P. Trujillo & Jada Alston Owens
The Roustabouts Theatre Co. presents Rona Munro’s IRON, a deeply moving psychological drama first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and extended into a sell-out run at The Royal Court in London. Convicted for life for a brutal murder, Fay has served 15 years of her sentence without a single visitor when her daughter Josie suddenly turns up to visit. Raised by her grandmother, Josie has no memory of the incident that led to her mother’s imprisonment, and has come to uncover the past – a past Fay wishes to forget. Transfixing and disturbing in equal measure, IRON focuses on fractured family, criminal justice, and the mother/daughter bond.
Second Stage Reading Series
Twelve Angry Men
By Reginald Rose
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Lawrence Brown, Sandy Campbell, Roxane Carrasco, Jim Chovick, Melinda Gilb, Samantha Ginn, Ron Christopher Jones, Jason Maddy, David McBean, Durwood Murray, Walter Murray & Milena Phillips
A classic play with modern-day relevancy! Reginald Rose's courtroom drama takes on issues that are still relevant today as 12 jurors deliberate the fate of an accused murderer. Tempers get short, arguments grow heated, and the jurors become 12 angry people. The jurors' final verdict and how they reach it will electrify the audience and keep them on the edge of their seats.
Second Stage Reading Series
The Tale of the Allergist's Wife
A Joint Production with Scripps Ranch Theatre
By Charles Busch
Directed by Kim Strassburger
Featuring Wendy Waddell, Debra Wanger, Phil Johnson, Jill Drexler, Alex Guzman & Kaia Bugler
Marjorie Taub, a middle-aged Upper West Side Doctor’s wife, is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at MOMA and evenings at BAM. Plunged into a mid-life crisis of Medea-like proportions, she’s shaken out of her lethargy by the reappearance of a fascinating and somewhat mysterious childhood friend.
Second Stage Reading Series
Celebration of New Writers of Color
By Carmen Amon, Mabelle Reynoso, Roy Sekigahama, Gill Sotu & Christian St. Croix
Directed by Ron Christopher Jones
Featuring Anise Ritchie, Kris Bona, Walter Murray, Imahni King-Murillo, Arianna Vila & Shirley Johnston
San Diego has a diverse and underrepresented pool of talented playwrights. Part of our mission is to produce new works. TRTC is dedicated to providing experiences and opportunities for BIPOC, AAPI, and Latinx artists and diverse audiences, both onstage and off. Our evening of writers of color includes short new pieces with a discussion afterward. Our team of Co-Producer/Director Ron Jones and Co-Producer Will Cooper bring together local talents in the best light, to introduce you to the next artistic wave.
Main Stage Production
For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls...
By Christopher Durang
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Omri Schein, Wendy Waddell, Walter Murray, Wendy Maples & Christine Hewitt
A night of irreverent sketch comedy from the funniest playwright on Broadway! An evening of 5 hilarious one-act theatrical comedies by the inimitable Durang, writer of the wildly funny Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge. Featuring four of San Diego’s funniest and well-known comic actors, you’ll laugh yourself silly. Fun and fast-moving, a welcome one-two punch to the Quarantine Blues from TRTC. Not always politically correct...but always hysterically entertaining.
Second Stage Reading Series
Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge
By Christopher Durang
Directed by Phil Johnson
Featuring Eileen Bowman, Phil Johnson, Omri Schein, Durwood Murray, Bryan Barbarin, Sue Boland, Teri Brown, Adam Daniel, Hayden Emmerson, Melissa Fernandes, Jo Anne Glover, Ron Christopher Jones, Walter Murray, Alexa Querin, Ben Williams & Wendy Maples
It's the ultimate Christmas party with the drunken Mrs. Bob Cratchit, the bumbling Ghost of Christmas Past, and the eternally cranky Ebenezer Scrooge. They're joined by the rest of Dickens' beloved characters in Durang's mash-up of the season's most beloved stories: A Christmas Carol, The Gift of the Magi, It's a Wonderful Life, and more! 'Tis the season for regret, envy, and greed as Mrs. Bob Cratchit ditches the hubby and the brats for a hilariously twisted adventure all her own.
Main Stage Virtual Production
Book Of Leaves
By Will Cooper
Directed by Kim Strassburger
Featuring Tom Stephenson, Leigh Akin, Justin Lang, Maybelle Shimizu, Durwood Murray, Kandace Crystal & Rebecca Crigler
In this contemporary drama, Walter’s grown children don’t know he’s dying of cancer, and they have secrets of their own. Over the course of a long weekend at his tree-shrouded home, many truths come to light, including what happened to his wife, their mother, who died seventeen years earlier. Conflicting desires and hidden ambitions converge in a suspenseful, emotionally charged story that will surprise, and move, mature audiences.
Main Stage Production
No Way Back
By Mahshid Fashandi Hager
Directed by Fran Gercke
Starring Jessica John
No Way Back is the true story of one family’s desperate escape out of Iran in 1981. We watch through the eyes of ten-year-old Mahshid as her country is cast into revolution, turmoil, and war. Her family’s secret escape out of the country will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last scene.
Main Stage Production
Roosevelt: Charge The Bear
By Marni Freedman & Phil Johnson
Starring Phil Johnson
Directed by Rosina Reynolds
In this one-man show about President Theodore Roosevelt, Phil Johnson portrayed one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century bringing this multi-faceted character to life in a truly riveting, energetic, and passionate performance. We see the new president grapple with the issues that would define his term: taking on the trusts, trying to get his message across to the people, and another enormous challenge - the coal strike of 1902. Miners and others were killed, tensions were high, and the biggest threat of all, that innocent people would freeze to death that winter. This American dynamo dealt with these in his own relentless energetic way and was an example of something in politics we miss today: conscience.
Second Stage Virtual Reading Series
Senorita Julia
By Matthew Salazar-Thompson
Directed by Dr. Maria Patrice Amon
Featuring Rachael VanWormer, Steven Lone, Carla Navarro, Catalina Maynard, Yvette Angulo, Allyn Moriyon, Dave Rivas, Sofia Sassone & Brian Mackey
In this tragic updated retelling of Strindberg's classic tale of servitude and status, José and Christina live under the auspice of Julia and her father, Mr. Warner, the owner of the Tomlenstein Ranchero. Blending themes from Miss Julie and Percy Shelly's Greek epic Prometheus Unbound, we find that the relationship between a Jewish kept daughter and a Chicano servant escalates to a dangerous consummation in a world that is not ready to accept the differences between class, race, and religion.
Main Stage Virtual Production
The Mountaintop
By Katori Hall
Directed by Kandace Crystal
Featuring Caiel Noble & Ashley Graham
The American History Theater, The Roustabouts Theatre Co., & Teenage Youth Performing Arts Theatre Company (TYPA) presented The Mountaintop by Katori Hall, a gripping reimagination of events the night before the assassination of the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On April 3, 1968, after delivering one of his most memorable speeches, an exhausted Dr. King retires to his room at the Lorraine Motel while a storm rages outside. When a mysterious stranger arrives with some surprising news, King is forced to confront his destiny and his legacy to his people.