The Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts' 2023-24 fall season includes performances by students, faculty members, and guest artists. The concerts, plays, and events will be held in venues across campus, and many of the events are free.

Music

Music events range from intimate chamber music recitals to large orchestra concerts and include a variety of musical styles. Performances are held in the Squires Recital Salon, Moss Arts Center, and the Creativity and Innovation District Living-Learning Community Building.

Theatre

This fall, two plays will be presented in Squires Studio Theatre, both featuring Virginia Tech students. Each show runs for six performances with general admission seating. The productions are a part of the 2023-24 Theatre Season of Empowerment, which also includes two spring shows, “Or” by Liz Duffy Adams and “The Taming of the Shrew” by William Shakespeare.

  • Sept. 26-29 and Oct. 1: “Placebo” by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Susanna Rinehart. In this sharply funny and knowing portrait of human relationships and the agonies of academia, Louise is a doctoral candidate working on a placebo-controlled study of a new drug to enhance female sex drive. Her partner Jonathan is a classics scholar struggling to complete his dissertation on Pliny the Elder. Mary, a participant in Louise’s study, is desperate to right the ship of her marriage, and fellow researcher Tom is questioning the value of studying aural stimulation. Gibson gives us a compelling and hilarious exploration of our search for purpose versus subsistence, of desire versus self-doubt, and the stories we tell ourselves as we are “stalking happiness with a machete.”
  • Nov. 7-11: “Sleep Deprivation Chamber” by Adam P. Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy, directed by David R. Gammons. In 1991, Adrienne Kennedy’s son Adam was brutally beaten by the police and then arrested for assaulting the officer in suburban Virginia after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop for a broken taillight. "Sleep Deprivation Chamber" fictionalizes those events — combining re-enactments of the encounter, courtroom and interrogation transcripts, and letters beseeching Virginia’s governor and others to intervene on their behalf. But the play is far from a simple documentary theatre project. Instead, it incorporates the elder playwright’s unique oneiric surrealism – sliding between nightmare sequences, fragmented memory, and overlapping consciousness. One of the play’s conceptual framing devices is a cast of college actors who are rehearsing a production of "Hamlet" under the direction of the central character, Teddy.  As in several of her plays, Adrienne Kennedy uses a surrogate for herself named Suzanne Alexander — a writer and academic, and here, specifically, a devastated and grieving mother who bravely takes on a corrupt and racist system.  A powerful and timely drama that explores violence, truth, and the struggle for justice, "Sleep Deprivation Chamber" is a hauntingly relevant X-ray of our fractured society.

Cinema

Oct. 21: Progeny Short Film Festival. Each year, the student-led Progeny Short Film Festival showcases local and regional talent. This year’s categories include animation, documentary, experimental, Hokie short, international, narrative, and social commentary. The festival will be held in at The Lyric Theatre.

Tickets for all events requiring admission fees are available online through the Moss Arts Center, at the Moss Arts Center ticket office, by phone at 540-231-5300, or at the door.

If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact Susan Sanders at susansan@vt.edu prior to the event.

For a list of all events, visit the School of Performing Arts events website.

Sign up for the School of Performance Arts’ newsletter for news and events information.

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