SIX POWERFUL SHOWS

We are proud to announce our 2025 Season: Reckoning, a lineup featuring powerful stories that delve into some of the most influential issues of this moment in American history—five full productions, plus a special experimental Oakland Theater Projects Presents production.

FROM Executive CO-ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Dear Friends,

In response to a rapidly shifting world, Oakland Theater Project’s 2025 Season is a direct reckoning with the moment we find ourselves in. Originally envisioned as a different lineup, this season was re-imagined following the 2024 election to respond to an alarming and rapidly changing reality.

Each play confronts the urgent questions of our era—from the targeting of trans people and mass deportations to the erasure of truth in authoritarian regimes, the explicit return of colonial ambitions, and the role of art as both refuge and resistance. We aim to engage our audience in a way that is personal, compassionate, and moving—not punishing, but also not escapist.

History shows that authoritarian regimes target theaters first. Theater remains one of the last places where truth can be spoken through metaphor, where a community can feel its own power, and where human connection is unmediated by technology. In a time of growing numbness and disillusionment, we believe theater has an essential role to play.

As the ground shifts beneath us, we refuse to look away. Oakland Theater Project’s 2025 season is an urgent act of engagement. Theater does not exist in a vacuum—it exists because of you, our audience.

Join us as we confront the questions of our time.

Michael Socrates Moran
Co-Artistic and Executive Director
Oakland Theater Project

2025 SEASON SUBSCRIPTION PACKAGES

6-Play Priority Subscription
(Reserved seating)
$250

6-Play General Admission Subscription
(Seating assigned upon arrival)
$150

6-Play Pay-What-You Can Subscription
$50 / $75

3-Play Priority Subscription
(Reserved seating)
$125

3-Play General Admission Subscription
(Seating assigned upon arrival)
$75

Plus, Ticket Packages are Flexible!
As a subscriber, you have the benefit of moving your tickets as many times as needed!

2025 SEASON SHOWS

The season opens with Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama I Am My Own Wife, directed by Michael Socrates Moran (Angels in America, Parts I & II; A Thousand Ships), introducing Renee Mannequin in the solo role.

Based on a true story, and inspired by interviews conducted by the playwright over several years, I Am My Own Wife tells the gripping tale of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a trans woman who survived World War II, a Nazi father, and the Gestapo in mid-20th-century Berlin. The play examines the sacrifices she made to survive and the moral conflicts that emerge from such survival.

OTP previously produced the play in 2016, with Co-Artistic Director William Hodgson in the title role. In 2025, what was once a prescient story is now an urgent one, spurring a new production that captures the starkness and brutality of an America vilifying trans people, teetering into authoritarianism, and risking a world on the edge of mass conflict.

I Am My Own Wife plays at Oakland Theater Project from March 21—April 6.

Following last season’s hit production of Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, OTP is thrilled to stage Majok’s breakthough 2014 play Ironbound, directed by Emilie Whelan (Cost of Living, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus), featuring OTP Associate Artistic Director Lisa Ramirez.

In a run-down New Jersey town, Darja, a Polish immigrant, is barely getting by on housecleaning and factory jobs. Over the course of 20 years and three relationships, Darja negotiates for her future with men who can offer her love or security—but never both. Darkly funny, perceptive and heartbreaking, Majok’s drama is an unflinching portrait of an immigrant woman's struggle for survival: a woman for whom love is both a luxury and a liability—and the American Dream is always just out of reach.

Ironbound  plays at Oakland Theater Project from May 2—18.

Up next, OTP presents Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, a play that explores early 20th century colonialism and the inescapable consequences therein.

At a time when discussions of U.S. expansionism—from the Panama Canal to Gaza—are resurfacing, these themes of colonization have never felt more urgent. This exploration of power, politics, and liberation resists simplistic narratives of good and evil, challenging us to confront the brutal complexities of empire.

Les Blancs plays at Oakland Theater Project from July 11—27.

Next, OTP returns to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an unparalleled exploration of corruption in halls of power and the personal cost of confronting systemic injustice.

In this new staging, Hamlet becomes the inverse of a Christ figure: where Christ sacrifices himself to save the world, Hamlet must sacrifice his soul—embracing violence and vengeance—to redeem it. Rather than offering salvation through forgiveness, Hamlet seeks justice through blood, asking whether redemption can ever come through destruction. Building on the resonance of OTP’s 2018 production, this reimagining confronts the crises of our time with unflinching clarity, asking: is it possible to confront a dark reality without becoming the darkness ourselves?

Throughout history, Hamlet has been staged to challenge authoritarian regimes through metaphor and performance, offering both critique and catharsis. In an America where authoritarianism no longer feels distant, Hamlet speaks with renewed urgency.

Following the success of 2024’s Angels in America at Marin Shakespeare Company’s new indoor theater in San Rafael, OTP Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran directs this bold new production, presented in a strictly limited run at Marin Shakes (514 Fourth Street, San Rafael, CA 94901) from September 5—21.

Up next is a special presentation of The Courtroom: A Reenactment of One Woman’s Deportation Proceedings, an urgent docu-drama created from real-life transcripts of a deportation trial, arranged by Arian Moayed.

The story centers on Elizabeth Keathley, a Filipina immigrant who entered the United States on a K-3 visa to live with her husband. After inadvertently checking “yes” on a driver’s license form, she was registered to vote, and participated in a midterm congressional election in violation of US election law. When the mistake was discovered at her citizenship hearings, the Department of Homeland Security ordered her deportation. The transcripts from a Chicago immigration court all the way to the US Court of Appeals present an unflinching look at the American immigration system—and one woman at its mercy.

Set inside an actual courtroom, this production places the audience in the role of a jury, asking them to consider whether justice was truly served. In an era of sweeping immigration crackdowns, The Courtroom brings the stakes of the legal system into sharp focus.

The Courtroom plays at Oakland Theater Project from October 9—19.

The season concludes with an electrifying new production of Kander & Ebb’s Tony award-winning musical Cabaret, directed by Erika Chong Shuch.

In the twilight of the Jazz Age, the Nazis are ascending to power, while the hedonistic nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub carries on. There, a young novelist named Clifford Bradshaw meets a cabaret singer named Sally Bowles—but can their relationship survive the cataclysmic changes in the world around them?

A collision of decadent celebration and psychological thriller, the multi-Tony-winning musical is directed and choreographed by Erika Chong Shuch. This contemporary Berlin-set production explores the tensions between entertainment and complicity. With the rise of the far right in Germany for the first time since the 1930s, Cabaret is no longer just a historical warning—it is a mirror held up to today’s world.

Cabaret plays at Oakland Theater Project from November 21—December 14.

Performance Location:

2025 Season performances will take place at Oakland Theater Project at FLAX art & design (1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland CA 94612), unless otherwise noted.

For a map, public transit and parking information, click here.

Tickets for Individual Shows:

$10—60 online or by calling our Box Office at 510.646.1126
Pay-what-you-can at the door (limited number)

If you have any questions, email our Box Office at boxoffice@oaklandtheaterproject.org