April 6th 2024
Naomi Parr, Basement Arts

A creative team of thirteen (including a director, music director, choreographer, designers, dramaturg, and stage manager) collaborated with a cast of seven performers to build a production of Falsettos by William Fin and James LaPine. The show had three performances across April 5th and 6th welcoming audiences free of charge into the Newman Studio. The story beautifully explores themes of unconventional family, Jewish identity, growing up, gender roles, and gay life in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

March 25th 2023
Zachary Kerholaus, Basement Arts

Horse Girls is a play about pre-teens: their obsessions, their insecurities and their desperate need to find a place in the world. The dark comedy addresses the manipulation and suppression of female identities, especially during the developmental stages of adolescence.

January 15th 2023
Marta Frank, Basement Arts

If The World Ends Tomorrow It’s All Your Fault is a devised theatre piece celebrating lost visual culture. It is a celebration of dwindling photojournalism and the stories physical news media once told. The exploration of how this loss has affected us as individuals as we transition to new forms of media is told through the lens of generation z, the first generation to grow up on the internet.

October 15th 2021
Abigail Anderson, Basement Arts

Abigail Anderson directs a theatrical performance in which five unlikely companions find themselves bonded for six short weeks in what can only be described as a crash-course for human connection disguised as a drama class. Relationships begin and end, revelations of self-discovery are made, and real people learn to cope and sympathize with their experiences by sharing them with one another.

March 20th 2021
Alexandra Lee, Basement Arts

This production of Slut: The Play by Kate Cappiello was filmed and streamed through YouTube. The stream was coupled with a post-show live talkback to address the portrayals of sexual violence in media. Panelists included experts from UM, the co-creator of the original production, and Dr. Ayshia Elizabeth Stephenson, an intimacy director, anti-racist advocate, and award-winning writer. This project was also a fundraiser for SAPAC and a local nonprofit that fights sexual violence, First Step.

February 26th 2021
Claire Vogel, Basement Arts

“She” is a devised piece exploring the different ways in which femininity is presented and ever-evolving, revolving around conversations of sexuality, politics of the female body, mental health and body image, navigating female relationships, and internalized misogyny.

March 14th 2020
Sydney Prince, Basement Arts

This play is a satire on the melodramatic fears of America during the Cold War. It’s 1956 and The Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein are having their annual quiche breakfast. As the assembled “widows” await the announcement of the society's prize-winning quiche, the atomic bomb sirens sound! Has the Communist threat come to pass? How will the “widows” respond as their idyllic town and lifestyle faces attacks? The actresses hold their focus on making the characters seem real, these women do not in any way find the events in the play funny; in fact the complete opposite is true; this is the most serious day of their lives. The basic foundation of this play revolves around the irony of fundamentalism.

January 24th 2020
Sydney Prince, Basement Arts

"​Falsettos"​ brings together two installments of the trilogy by William Flinn, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland to create a musical about love, family and loss through the lens of the 1980’s AIDS epidemic. Basement Arts brought together queer creators to put on a small, intimate performance.

November 23rd 2019
Skylar Siben, Basement Arts

This project was a weekend of performances of Kenneth Lonergan's play "This Is Our Youth" produced and performed entirely by students under the leadership of student theatre group, Basement Arts. The play deals with forty-eight hours in the lives of three very lost young souls living on the Upper West Side at the dawn of the Reagan era.

March 15th 2019
Basement Arts

Basement Arts put on a production of She Kills Monsters, a comic play about sisterhood, Dungeons & Dragons, and the queer experience written by Qui Nguyen. The project emerged from a group of BFA InterArt Performance majors dedicated to creating imaginative new work that bridges Stamps and SMTD disciplines. With this show, they hoped to exhibit three performances for student audiences, as well as foster new collaborative relationships between students from other SMTD departments, Stamps, LSA, and more through the production process.

December 11th 2018
Basement Arts

Basement Arts presented “Crowns: A Gospel Musical,” a coming of age story of a young inner-city African American girl from Brooklyn who recently lost her brother due to street violence. In order for this young girl to not bare the same fate as her brother, she is sent by her mother to the south to stay with her grandmother. Mother Shaw is her name and crowns are her game. Mother Shaw along with her other Hat Queens teach the young girl traditions, heritage, and the importance of self. The show was full of beautiful blues, gospel, and hip-hop that made the audience fall hopelessly into the world of the play.

November 9th 2018
Basement Arts

Basement Arts put on a student led and directed production of the phenomenal play “The Baltimore Waltz” by Paula Vogel. As taken from the back of the play: “When Anna, an unmarried school teacher, is diagnosed with ATD, Acquired Toilet Disease, a fatal new malady with a high risk factor for elementary school teachers, she and her brother Carl take flight to Europe.”What follows is an incredible and heart wrenching adventure with many twists and turns.

April 6th 2017
Basement Arts

DEAR by Lily Houghton was the last show featured in Basement Arts's Winter 2017 season. Written by a student playwright, DEAR is a theatre performance piece about four college aged women, taking place entirely in a communal dorm bathroom. The young women navigate the acts of violence that differentiate "mean girls" from female serial killers. DEAR is an incredibly well-written new play about a difficult subject matter - violence towards women and violence committed by women. In a world where female friendships are undervalued, it is powerful to have theatrical representations to remind everyone that women are stronger together than apart.

March 16th 2017
Basement Arts

Trevor by Nick Jones is is a dark comedy about an artistically frustrated former child star, named Trevor, who also happens to be a 200 pound chimpanzee. As Trevor’s frustrations mount, his discontent with his situation turns to erratic violence as he succumbs to his animal nature. The play featured a cast of seven and a production team of six. Like all of Basement Arts’ shows everything is student directed, designed, acted, and produced.

December 2nd 2016
Basement Arts

The production titled Hand to God, 5 time Tony-Award nominated play by Robert Askins, was tackled by Basement Arts, an entirely student-run theatre organization on campus. This production marked the first student production of Hand to God in the country. Produced, directed, acted, designed and organized entirely by students of various majors and backgrounds. The design team consisted of eight women and two men.