Arizona Theatre Company’s Next season has Laughs, Tears and a World Premiere

By Cathalena E. Burch. Originally published by the Arizona Daily Star.

Arizona Theatre Company will close its 2026-27 season next April with the world premiere of John Stephens’ Killing Kit — A Shakespeare Murder Mystery.

It will be the company’s second world premiere since Matt August became ATC’s Kasser Family artistic director in 2023, and among the dozens the company has done since its first, Linda and Michael Grady’s Dreamers of the Day, during ATC’s 20th anniversary season in 1987-88.

“It certainly is a notch in our belt, and it’s our contribution to the American theater and what’s going on around the country,” August said of ATC’s record of introducing new works. “To be able to launch a play … is a unique opportunity, and it’s something that we don’t take lightly, because we know that what happens here is going to be cemented for the life of that play.”

August has been working on Killing Kit since Stephens’ agent sent him the play more than a year ago. It will be the company’s second world premiere under his tenure since the company staged Robert Schenkkan’s “Bob & Jean: A Love Story” in the 2024-25 season.

Killing Kit is centered on the mysterious 1593 death of Elizabethan playwright Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, who some scholars say greatly influenced William Shakespeare.

Stephens, whose TV writing and producing credits include Gotham, Gossip Girl, Gilmore Girls and The O.C., “has written this wonderful story that sort of hypothesizes that Christopher Marlowe’s ghost is not at peace,” August said.

“He enlists the help of Shakespeare, his friend and rival playwright, to figure out what happens to him and why he is not at rest,” August said. “It’s a very funny send up of Elizabethan mores and Elizabethan literature while being a very compelling murder mystery. … (Stephens) comes up with a totally new hypothesis for what may have happened to Christopher Marlowe, which is one of the great unsolved murders of literary history.”

August has been workshopping the play with Stephens for the better part of the last year. Before it lands on the Temple of Music and Art stage on April 25, 2027, he will take it to ASU in Tempe and the Antaeus Theatre Company in Los Angeles, where ATC Executive Director Ana Rose O’Halloran spent a decade before coming to ATC last November.

August said he believes Killing Kit will be produced by “every Shakespeare festival in the country” over the next five seasons, and programs at each of them will have a footnote crediting ATC for the world premiere.

ATC has produced more than two dozen world premieres since the late 1980s including mounting a new work every season between 1994-95 and the 2005-06 season, according to ATC records.

ATC’s 2026-27 season opens Sept. 27 with David Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, which is currently on Broadway. 

“It’s a very sweet love story wrapped up in this other story about a woman really finding herself and finding her voice and being allowed to find her voice while she’s battling her sister, battling her mental health and also battling the fact that nobody believes that she’s capable of coming up with this math equation,” August said. “It’s a really, really lovely story.”

“Proof” runs through Oct. 17.

• For only the second time in its history and the first time since the mid-1990s, ATC is bringing back the Alan Menken-Howard Ashman musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors from Nov. 28 to Dec. 20. The show is a coproduction with Utah’s Pioneer Theatre Company, which collaborated with ATC in the 2024-25 season on Jeffrey Hatcher’s mystery Dial M For Murder.
• ATC kicks off the new year with more comedy with The Play That Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. Seems that no matter how hard the small theater company attempts to put on a murder mystery play, nothing goes right. That’s the premise of The Play That Goes Wrong, a comedy that runs from Jan. 31-Feb. 20, 2027. The production is a collaboration with Seattle Rep and Portland Center Stage. 
• August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean was the first of 10 plays in the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s American Century Cycle exploring life in Pittsburgh’s historically African-American Hill District. 

“This is an August Wilson play that we haven’t done before,” said August, who said audiences have been asking ATC to bring Wilson’s works back into the lineup.

August said Gem of the Ocean is “a beautiful, metaphoric play that has incredible characters that set up the entire decades-long century that he writes about of this neighborhood in Pittsburgh.”

“It becomes this beautiful metaphor for what happened with the Black experience in the beginning part of the century,” August explained.

Director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg will bring a cast with her when she leads the ATC production.

“It’s going to be a really exciting take on August Wilson,” said August.

ATC season tickets are now available.