Theatre Program Starts 2025-26 Season with a Red Letter Play
ALBANY, N.Y. (Oct. 14) — UAlbany's Theatre Program opens its 2025–26 season with In the Blood, a contemporary drama by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. The production features UAlbany student actors directed by Visiting Assistant Professor Shaun Patrick Tubbs. Student designers, guided by Theatre faculty, will bring the play to life in the Performing Arts Center’s Lab Theatre.
“In the Blood centers its story on the systemic injustices that are far too common within the fabric of our society and the harsh realities of poverty and motherhood for Black women,” said Tubbs. He described the play as “supremely raw at its core.”
“Though I believe that having wealth in no way affords us a perfect life, this play makes it clear that poverty carries a cost that those with economic privilege will never know,” Tubbs added. “As it unfolds it stings us with a truth that repulses, titillates, haunts and makes us self-reflective.”
In the Blood is one of Parks’ two Red Letter Plays, inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It explores the hypocrisy of American society, especially around morality and the control of women’s sexuality. When the play premiered at The Public Theater in 1999, Albany native Charlayne Woodard starred as Hester. The work has since become a contemporary classic, including a major New York revival at Signature Theatre in 2017.
“Suzan-Lori Parks is a vital American voice and the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Topdog/Underdog,” said Music and Theatre Associate Professor and Chair Kate Walat. “Having our students bring to life her poetic language and theatrical vision — and to learn by experiencing the work of such an important contemporary writer — is an essential part of their training.”
“It’s a bold beginning to our 2025–26 season,” Walat added. “Later this fall, we present Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, followed by a fantastical new staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream next semester, directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Acting Michael Schantz. We’ll close the year with our annual FRESH ACTS festival of new plays.”
Performances run Oct. 22–26 in the Performing Arts Center’s Lab Theatre on UAlbany’s Uptown Campus. Showtimes are Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m., Friday at 3 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.