Classical Theatre Company’s 24/25 Season Digs into Their Niche

Emily Hynds·
HoustonTheater
·

After years of turbulent flux, Classical Theatre Company has settled into a new routine. This season they will produce a new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Both plays will be presented at The Deluxe, CTC’s performance home since 2019.

In the past, CTC produced three plays per season, each with a three week run. To say that CTC has undergone changes over the last seven years would be an understatement. They are no longer housed in their own space at Chelsea Market, they weathered a pandemic and multiple natural disasters, and suffered a fire at their offices and rehearsal space, Winter Street Studios.

“During those years of flux (2017-2023) it was hard because we lost homes and performance spaces, our headquarters,” CTC’s Artistic Director JJ Johnston explains. “Our costume, props, and furniture stock. Everything was shutting down and opening back up again, and then shutting down and opening back up again. We needed to stabilize the organization. It was so topsy-turvy for years. We needed to find what the new normal was.”

So CTC decided to produce only two plays and to shorten each play’s run from three weeks to two. They eventually landed at The Deluxe, a beautifully restored theater in a historical landmark building in the Fifth Ward. This season, in addition to Dracula and Three Sisters, CTC will continue its partnership with To Be Or RPG, a mashup between a role playing game and classical drama—many places, plot points, and characters are drawn from classical canon.

The first two-show season in 2023-2024 was a success. “We did Medea. We did Taming of the Shrew. It was a season of iconic female roles. Big named plays. And it was the best attended season we’ve had since 2018, since we were in Chelsea Market. Before ‘the troubles.’ It was incredibly reassuring.”

They decided to stick with two shows this season but extend the runs back to three weeks. First up is Dracula in October, adapted by Chris Iannacone from Bram Stoker’s novel. This adaptation aims to present a version of the character and story very different from the current pop-culture image. Blake Weir will direct, his first time in that role for CTC. The production team includes Afsaneh Aayani on scenery, costumes by Leah Smith, Jon Harvey designing sound, and lights by Edgar Guajardo, who is in residence at the Deluxe. To prepare, sound designer Jon Harvey has been listening to “sounds of blood.”

CTC stays true to their mission even with new adaptations. “We’ve gone back to the book,” Johnston says. “It’s all derived from the novel, because that’s what we do here at CTC. Even when we write or adapt new scripts, it’s still entirely faithful to the source material. We’re not writing a new play, we’re taking what Bram Stoker wrote and making it into a script for the stage.”

In April, Johnston will direct Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, another play packed with iconic female roles. “I love early modern playwrights,” he says. “When I started the company, I decided that every year we were going to do some Shakespeare, because his plays weren’t produced that often. And we did that for a while, but then Main Street started doing some Shakespeare, and Fourth Wall was doing Shakespeare. The need didn’t seem to be there anymore. So then we started really digging into early modern playwrights. Chekhov and Ibsen and Strindberg. Shaw and Wilde. No one else does those playwrights really, and so that became our niche.”

This version of Three Sisters will have scenery designed by Matthew Keenan, costumes by Lilli Lemberger, sound again by Jon Harvey, and Edgar Guajardo will also design the lights. Johnston’s love for Chekhov shines through, a playwright he thinks is misunderstood in the United States.

“Most general audiences might say the plays are so sad, melancholic, dramatic. Those things do exist in the play, they absolutely do. But if you see Chekhov in Russia, they are rolling in the aisles with laughter. It’s more like Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown is funny because nothing works out for him. He’s such a sad sack. There is absurdity in the world. That’s what Chekhov does: he highlights the absurdity of life.”

For a company rooted in the past, CTC has adapted remarkably well. CTC’s journey, and forthcoming season, mirrors so admirably what they try to do with these classic texts: finding what works in this changing world while honoring original intent.

—EMILY HYNDS

Emily Hynds

Emily Hynds is a writer, producer, and shop owner in Houston, TX.