4 September - 20 September, 2026
Director: Sara Holdren
About the show: On a quiet Sunday morning, a brutal coup topples the country of Grusinia into chaos. The ruling classes scrap and claw for power as the peasants simply try to survive. In this world on fire, a young servant girl named Grusha finds a baby — the child of the rich governor, abandoned when his mother fled. She makes a choice, and an adventure begins.
Haydn Haring as Actor 1
John Holdren as Actor 2
Stephanie Rinaldi as Actor 3
Alex Griffith as Actor 4
Bella Hersman as Actor 5
Grace Trapnell as Actor 6
C. Glen Williams as Actor 7
Ella Caplin as Actor 8
Mathias Glick as Actor 9
Ariel Tatum as Actor 10
Andrew Akre as Actor 11
Nick Heiderstat as Actor 12
Kyra Gibson as Actor 13
Gabrielle Laskey as Actor 14
Jayda Everett as Actor 15
Taylor Ballard as Actor 16
Ben Brantley as Musician
Debbie Owen - Production Stage Manager
Caroline Abdenour-Brown - Assistant Stage Manager
Will Slusher - Scenic Designer
Mix Rudolph - Lighting Designer
Ivy Jean - Assistant Lighting Designer
Theo Teichmann - Sound Designer
Colin Killalea - Composer/Music Director
Talya Vardimon - Props Designer
Tricia Emlet - Costume Designer
Completed in 1945 after the great theater-maker Bertolt Brecht’s escape from Nazi Europe, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is part musical, part parable — funny, expansive, lyrical, and humane. It’s a picaresque satire, a courtroom drama, and an exquisite poem for wartime, all rolled into one. Through the tough, good-hearted Grusha and the wily, world-weary rascal-turned-judge, Azdak, the play asks what we owe to each other in times of crisis and whether we can escape our own cynicism to remake a corrupt and broken world.
About the director:
Sara Holdren is a director, writer, and teacher who was born in Charlottesville, Virginia and raised in the Blue Ridge foothills and, artistically, right here at Live Arts. She is the Pulitzer-nominated theater critic of New York magazine as well as the winner of the 2016-2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She currently teaches in the directing department at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and her recent directing work includes Faust (Heartbeat Opera), The Oresteia and Cymbeline (NYU Grad Acting), As You Like It (Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival), Three Sisters and Twelfth Night (Two River Theater), and, with her own theater collective Tiltyard, MIDSUMMER, an original Shakespearean adaptation last performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She has been seeing and making shows at Live Arts since she was very small and has, at various times, acted, designed, directed, season programmed, graphic designed, built sets, hung lights, made lifelong friends, eaten pizza, and performed as an aerialist at the corner of 2nd and Water Street. She is thrilled to return to the Gibson Theater and to build something new with this community that she deeply loves.
Audition dates and more information coming soon!
