Season 52

2025

Join us for Season 52 at Birmingham Festival Theatre, where laughter meets timeless storytelling in a delightful array of funny and classic productions. This season, we bring you beloved comedies and twists on iconic classics that promise to entertain and inspire. From the hilarious antics of wit-filled misadventures to the poignant moments that have stood the test of time, our lineup is designed to captivate audiences of all ages. Don't miss your chance to experience the magic of live theater as we celebrate the joy of performance. Get ready for a season filled with laughter, nostalgia, and unforgettable memories!

Stupid Fucking Bird by Aaron Posner, sort of adapted from The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
March 14 - 30, 2025

An aspiring young director rampages against the art created by his mother’s generation. A nubile young actress wrestles with an aging Hollywood star for the affections of a renowned novelist. And everyone discovers just how disappointing love, art, and growing up can be. In this irreverent, contemporary, and very funny remix of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Aaron Posner stages a timeless battle between young and old, past and present, in search of the true meaning of it all. Original songs composed by James Sugg draw the famously subtextual inner thoughts of Chekhov’s characters explicitly to the surface. STUPID FUCKING BIRD will tickle, tantalize, and incite you to consider how art, love, and revolution fuel your own pursuit of happiness.

“Aaron Posner’s savvy, petulant blitz through Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull [is] less an adaptation of Chekhov’s landmark drama than a funny, moving slugfest, a ripe mashup of mock and awe…sometimes it blows Chekhov up, and sometimes the play explodes with a genuinely Chekhovian release of emotion. The show is smart enough to have it both ways: It mines The Seagull for classical heft even while giving it the bird.” —Washington Post.

“Like the play that inspired it, this adaptation offers a unique glimpse at the state of the theatrical art form and more broadly, the difficult pursuit of art and creativity. Angsty, raw, and real, this play does not shy away from the hard, but well-discussed philosophical questions about art, reality, love and life and what it all means. Yet, it does so in a way that’s likely to engage contemporary theatrically savvy audiences.” —BroadwayWorld.

Tickets are available now to all of our Season members.

Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling
April 25 - May 11, 2025

The action is set in Truvy’s beauty salon in Chinquapin, Louisiana, where all the ladies who are “anybody” come to have their hair done. Helped by her eager new assistant, Annelle (who is not sure whether or not she is still married), the outspoken, wise-cracking Truvy dispenses shampoos and free advice to the town’s rich curmudgeon, Ouiser, ("I’m not crazy, I’ve just been in a bad mood for forty years"); an eccentric millionaire, Miss Clairee, who has a raging sweet tooth; and the local social leader, M’Lynn, whose daughter, Shelby (the prettiest girl in town), is about to marry a “good ole boy.” Filled with hilarious repartee and not a few acerbic but humorously revealing verbal collisions, the play moves toward tragedy when, in the second act, the spunky Shelby (who is a diabetic) risks pregnancy and forfeits her life. The sudden realization of their mortality affects the others, but also draws on the underlying strength—and love—which give the play, and its characters, the special quality to make them truly touching, funny and marvelously amiable company in good times and bad.

Concerned with a group of gossipy southern ladies in a small-town beauty parlor, the play is alternately hilarious and touching—and, in the end, deeply revealing of the strength and purposefulness which underlies the antic banter of its characters.

“Harling has given his women sharp, funny dialogue…The play builds to a conclusion that is deeply moving.” —New York Daily News.
“…a skillfully crafted, lovingly evoked picture of eccentricity in the small-town South…Robert Harling is a new voice in the theatre and the qualities of STEEL MAGNOLIAS suggest he may be an important one.” —Drama-Logue.
“…suffused with humor and tinged with tragedy.” —New York Post.

Tickets are available now to all of our Season Members.

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood
June 6 - 22, 2025

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? Winner of the 2012 NYC International Fringe Festival as Best Overall Production, 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche is a tasty recipe of hysterical laughs, sexual innuendoes, unsuccessful repressions, and delicious discoveries.

“A cult hit... gleaming with comic polish.” – Time Out New York
“Its raw and magnetic dementia seems destined to attract a cult following.” – The New York Times
“Expanded from an award-winning sketch, this wonderfully ridiculous scenario delivers what it promises. This ensemble piece is smart, sharp and hysterically funny.” – Time Out Chicago

Tickets are available now to all of our Season members.