All My Sons

by Arthur Miller

producing artistic director’s notes by Emilia Sargent

We at the Tampa Repertory Theatre are thrilled to have you here with us for our twelfth season of creating transformative, relevant, and compelling professional theatre that connects our diverse audience and artists through meaningful and inspiring shared experiences. This season has been an exploration of responsibility: social, familial, and individual. It is a celebration of our capabilities, our vulnerabilities, and the challenges of being human – together. We study history so that we can learn from our mistakes and create a better future for ourselves and for our descendants. So often, as we look back, we find that those before us faced the same social and human challenges that we face today, just in different settings. Our play selections this season have all drawn from history to highlight themes that resonate today.

We began our season with A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath, sequel of sorts to Ibsen’s 1879 groundbreaking masterwork, A Doll’s House, which presented thought-provoking questions about gender inequality, marriage, and human rights, as well as the conflicting ideas of personal freedom and responsibility brought forth through intelligent humor. The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance, a beautiful story based on the life of John Merrick, a horribly deformed man who lived in London during the latter part of the nineteenth century, used historical fact to explore dark human experiences, illuminate some of society’s failings, as well as reveal our universal humanness. Our final show of the season embodies an integral part of our artistic intent: to produce theatre with an emphasis on American classics. All My Sons by Arthur Miller thrillingly examines the conflict between familial and social responsibility, as well as individual morality, liability, culpability, and guilt.

TampaRep’s vision is to be a thriving regional theatre, built on creative excellence and inclusivity, which enhances Tampa as a cultural destination and enriches and reflects our community as an artistic home for all to discover, share, create, and experience meaningful stories. Some of the first steps we have taken in service of this vision include paying artists and designers more, expanding our artistic family, finding ways to make live theatre more accessible to our community, and partnering with other artistic organizations to enhance live theatre in Tampa. We have been able to accomplish these things because of the generous support of our donors and sponsors – audience members from our community like you.

On behalf of TampaRep, I offer our heartfelt thanks to the USF School of Theatre and Dance for their warm welcome and for hosting TampaRep. At TampaRep, we create an experience — one that the audience completes — in productions that are innovative, provocative, and classic. Thank you for being here to complete the experience that is live theatre. Please lean in and discover All My Sons, the relevance of its themes in current society, and the many reasons we love this play.

– Emilia Sargent, Artistic Director