15th Anniversary Season
Fifteen years of creating theatre that challenges expectations, crosses boundaries, and makes room for the unexpected. Arizona Theatre Matters’ 2026–27 season brings together eight distinctive offerings spanning new plays, audio theatre, historical drama, public inquiry, and an international Fringe festival. Different stories. Different forms. An extraordinary range of human experience.
Public Humanities
Uneven Minds
How do we recognize ability when a mind refuses to fit the labels assigned to it? Bringing theatre, lived experience, and public conversation together, Uneven Minds examines trauma, cognition, and creativity while asking whose knowledge we trust, whose struggles we overlook, and what changes when we listen differently.
Dark Comedy
Midnight at the Algorithm & Blues
Two ghost-hunting livestreamers sneak into Grant’s Tomb, hoping to capture their biggest supernatural scoop. History has other plans. Gary Wright’s dark comedy brings restless spirits, a turbulent marriage, and America’s unfinished arguments together in one spectacularly ill-advised night.
February 12–28, 2027
Glendale International Fringe Festival
For seventeen days, Glendale’s libraries become stages for the unexpected. Fifty-two free performances bring artists and audiences together across genres, styles, and perspectives, transforming familiar public spaces into places of artistic discovery. An international celebration of theatre, imagination, and the possibilities of live performance.
Solo Drama
On Track
S. Brian Willson once believed unquestioningly in the country that sent him to war. Years later, while protesting the transport of weapons, he stood on railroad tracks before a train that did not stop. Drawn from his life and memoirs, this solo drama asks what moral conviction costs, and what survives.
Backstage Tragicomedy
Mackers
A company previews The Scottish Play. The cast is ready, the crew is braced, and everyone has a different theory about what should never be said inside a theatre. In this backstage tragicomedy, professional pride meets theatrical superstition, and keeping the show alive becomes an art all its own.
Artistic Practice
How We Make Theatre
Accessibility is not an addition to the season. It is part of the material from which the work is made and shared.
Audio Theatre
Red Earth, Long Shadows
On a veranda in Kenya, Daphne Sheldrick invites a visitor to listen. What follows is a life among orphaned elephants: improbable rescues, devastating losses, and the patient work of preparing the vulnerable to return to the wild. This richly layered audio drama finds its heartbeat in the sounds of Tsavo.
Historical Drama
Flight of the Dove
Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress, then challenged the country she served by refusing to support war. A childhood story follows her through the years, asking what it takes to meet fear without surrendering compassion. A historical drama about courage, consequence, and the lonely work of conscience.
Historical Drama
The Magnificent Welles
Rio de Janeiro, 1942. Orson Welles is making a film while Hollywood takes another one apart. As studio executives recut The Magnificent Ambersons, the prodigious director wrestles with artistic control, ambition, and the cost of being called a genius. Marcus Wolland’s intimate drama reveals the man behind the legend.