Archives

Staged Reading

The Odd Couple

By Neil Simon

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Melinda Gilb, Sam Ginn, Teri Brown., Amy Dell, Jill Drexler, Eliott Goretsky, Kerry Meads, Alyssa Anne Schechter & Daren Scott

Experience the hilarious brilliance of Neil Simon's classic, The Odd Couple, reimagined with a delightful twist. Set in the heart of New York City, this beloved comedy is turned on its ear as two of San Diego's leading female comedy stars step into the roles of Oscar and Felix. Witness the uproarious antics and heartwarming friendship of this mismatched duo as they navigate life's trials with laughter and wit. This fresh take on a timeless story promises a night of side-splitting humor and unexpected delights, showcasing the talents of some of the finest comedic actresses in a performance that breathes new life into a theatrical masterpiece.

Mainstage Production

Looped

By Matthew Lombardo

Directed by Phil Johnson

Starring Eileen Bowman & Alex Guzman

Featuring Chris Braden

Tallulah Bankhead was an actress, free spirit, baseball fan, animal lover, drinker, bawdy shocker of prudes, and a scourge of bigots and hypocrites. The convent-reared Southern belle had a vocabulary that could blush even a sailor. Looped tells the story of the famously boozy Miss Bankhead, the internationally celebrated actress being called into a sound studio in 1965 to re-record (or “loop”) one line of dialogue for what would be her last film. She hilariously spars with an uptight film editor, revealing details about their lives. After seeing this, the theater will never be the same again.

“Say anything about me, darling, as long as it isn’t boring.” - Tallulah Bankhead

Staged Reading

'hoods

By Matthew Salazar-Thompson

Tatiana, a passionate 20-year-old DACA student at UCSD, uses her gift for poetry and spoken word to rise above the challenges of homelessness. Alongside her Auntie, a fierce champion for equality, and Zeal, a friend who brings light to the LGBTQ+ journey, Tatiana fosters a community brimming with warmth and inspiration. With poetry, music and dance, their 3 stories rush forward to illuminate the power of empathy, dignity, and the unyielding pursuit of a better future.

This play is a celebration of creativity, resilience, and the human spirit. Be a part of this transformative one-night-only event and leave with a renewed sense of hope and a drive to make a difference in your own community.

Staged Reading

The Importance of Being Earnest

By Oscar Wilde

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Bryan Barbarin, Chris Braden, Adam Daniel, Katee Drysdale, Portia Gregory, Taylor Henderson & Durwood Murray

Step into the whimsical world of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a delightful romp through the intricacies of Victorian society, where witty banter and charming paradoxes reveal the absurdities of social conventions. Join a vibrant cast of characters as they navigate the perils of mistaken identities and romantic entanglements, all in the pursuit of love and matrimonial bliss. Wilde's masterful comedy of manners offers a scintillating blend of satire and farce, promising an evening of laughter and light-hearted entertainment. A new take on a timeless classic. Is the setting 1900’s London or The Real Housewives of Atlanta?

Staged Reading

Falsettos

Book by William Finn & James Lapine

Music & Lyrics by William Finn

Directed by Phil Johnson

Musical Direction by Kyle Adam Blair

Featuring Katee Drysdale, Heidi Gantwerk, Joey Landwehr, Jeff Myers, Ella Serrano, Matt Starkey & Debra Wanger

Hilarious, heartbreaking and utterly unique, Falsettos is a contemporary musical about family, relationships, bar mitzvahs, baseball and AIDS. When Marvin leaves his wife Trina and son Jason to be with his lover Whizzer, tempers flare, problems escalate and everyone learns to grow up. Falsettos features a local star studded cast including Heidi Gantwerk, Debra Wanger, Ella Serrano, and Joey Landwehr.

Staged Reading

Celebration of New Writers

Featuring new works by Les Abromovitz, Stephanie Buckley, Yide Cai, Allie Costa, Susan Lily Jackson, Jonathan Josephson, Carla Navarro & Matthew Salazar-Thompson

San Diego has a diverse and underrepresented pool of talented playwrights. Part of our mission is to produce new works. The Roustabouts Theatre Co. is dedicated to providing experiences and opportunities for artists and diverse audiences, both onstage and off. The evening of writers includes short new pieces with a discussion afterward. Our team brings together local talents in the best light, to introduce you to the next artistic wave.

Staged Reading

The Last Night of Ballyhoo

By Alfred Uhry

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Leigh Akin, Marley Bauer, Cristyn Chandler, Fred Harlow, Salomon Maya, Liliana Talwatte & Debra Wanger

Alfred Uhry’s dark comedy examines the inner workings of the South’s finest Jewish families in 1939, as Gone With the Wind is enjoying its world premier and Hitler is invading Poland. However, this upper class German-Jewish community is more concerned with who is attending the formal ball, Ballyhoo. Hilarity ensues as these families are forced to confront their intra-ethnic bias.

Mainstage Production Show

Hand To God

By Robert Askins

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Rebecca Crigler, Adam Daniel, Sam Ginn, Dave Rivas & Devin Wade

From reading to production, The Roustabout Theatre Co. is bringing the blazing comedic explosion, Hand to God to its main stage! See the Sunday School hand puppet come to life and take over a shy student and wreak havoc on his world. While tackling big and serious life themes, this play is balanced by dirty, foul-mouthed, provocative, cover-your-ears kind of humor — it’s been called the “funniest play ever produced on Broadway.”

Second Stage Reading Series

The Year of Magical Thinking

"This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you…” Joan Didion’s best-selling memoir about the sudden loss of her husband and daughter is brought to life in this stunning and powerful one-woman show that the New York Times called “an indelible portrait of loss and grief.” An uplifting, arresting and powerful drama that explores the question: how does the soul process grief and loss?

Second Stage Reading Series

Stones In His Pocket

By Marie Jones

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Chris Braden, Adam Daniels, Sam Ginn, David McBean, & Wendy Waddell

Pairs of actors rotate each night, portraying a total of 13 characters between them, to tell the hilarious story of what happens when a Hollywood film studio descends upon a rural Ireland town to film an epic blockbuster, and when a young man’s unexpected fall turns everything upside-down. This quintessentially Irish story is witty, charming, and heartwarming all at once. A play that explores and explodes the bounds of comedy and drama, of pathos and whimsy, of heartstring and funny bone. And who better to bring this captivating story to the stage than some of San Diego's finest clowns? 

Second Stage Reading Series

A reading in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center

Watch On The Rhine

By Lillian Hellman

Directed by Jacquelyn Ritz & Phil Johnson

Featuring Grace Delaney, Vanessa Dinning, Layth Haddad, Joey Landwehr, Eddy Lukovic, Carla Navarro, Andrew Oswald, Caroline Ritz Daugherty, Eben Rosenzweig & Wendy Waddell

Watch on the Rhine is set in late spring 1940 in Washington, D.C. It follows a German-born, anti-fascist man, his American wife, and their three children who find themselves visiting wealthy relatives since fleeing Europe seeking peace but find they have not come here alone. War, fascism, and espionage are all exposed in this three-act drama that evolves into an intense thriller.

Main Stage Production

The Savoyard Murders

By Omri Schein

Directed by Omri Schein & Phil Johnson

Featuring Eliott Goretsky, Taylor Henderson, Phil Johnson, David McBean, Durwood Murray, Daren Scott & Wendy Waddell

An outrageous group of theater people is trapped in a luxurious Edwardian mansion for hours on end only to find one deliciously murdered, one a diabolical suspect. Full-tilt personalities tortured by their own foibles are done away with by each fashionable other. Premiering its onstage debut, The Savoyard Murders is full of over-the-top, scandalous drama that ensues — the perfect ingredients for a hilarious murder mystery that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Second Stage Reading Series

True West

By Sam Shepard

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring David McBean, Jason Maddy, Richard Trujillo, Sue Boland & Dianne Yvette

Austin is an intelligent, ivy-league screenwriter – his unpredictable brother Lee is a con artist and petty thief. Austin is battling writer’s block when these two estranged brothers meet in their mother’s desert home. The pressure rises as the brothers slowly draw closer, as if being sucked into an inevitable black hole. The past is recalled, old grudges recounted, and typewriters are smashed right on stage. A wild, funny, and brooding classic story of conflict, True West has been called Sam Shephard’s “masterwork” and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983.

Second Stage Reading Series

A reading in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center

Enter Laughing

By Joseph Stein

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Scott Striegel, Alex Guzman, Durwood Murray, Rin Ehlers Sheldon, Phil Johnson, Daren Scott, Jessica John, D. Candis Paule, Eliott Goretsky, Leigh Akin, Scott Striegel & Jason Heil

A sidesplitting adaptation of the semi-autobiographical Carl Reiner novel. David Kolowitz (Reiner) is a sewing machine delivery boy who has his eyes set on theatrical stardom. His parents want him to become a druggist, but he defies them and leaves their dreams behind to be cast as the leading man in a third-rate theater company’s production. Culminating in a hilarious first performance where everything that can go wrong, does! This uproarious show is brought to life as only The Roustabouts can!

Second Stage Reading Series

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

By Sarah Ruhl

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Sandy Campbell, Jason Maddy, Thomas Edward Daugherty, Vicky Dawson, Leigh Akin,  Yolanda Franklin & Mikaela Macias

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café, a stranger at the next table who has had enough, and a dead man with a lot of loose ends…so begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone. A wildly imaginative new comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl. A work about how we memorialize the dead and how that remembering changes us. It is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a tech-obsessed world.

Second Stage Reading Series

Celebration of New Writers

Directed by Matthew Salazar-Thompson



San Diego has a diverse and underrepresented pool of talented playwrights. Part of our mission is to produce new works. TRTC is dedicated to providing experiences and opportunities for artists and diverse audiences, both onstage and off.

Our evening of writers includes short new pieces with a discussion afterward. Our team brings together local talents in the best light, to introduce you to the next artistic wave.

JPlays with The Roustabouts

The Little Foxes

By Lillian Hellman

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Shana Wride, Sandy Campbell, Andrew Oswald, Fred Harlow, Matthew Salazar-Thomson, Hayden Emmerson, Walter Murray, Catalina Zelles & Vanessa Dinning



Continuing with the mission of highlighting great Jewish theatre writers of the 20th century, The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman is a drama that grapples with the themes of greed, betrayal, and corruption, set against the backdrop of the post-Civil War south. 

Second Stage Reading Series

This Land is My Land

Written & Directed by Matthew Salazar-Thompson

Featuring San Diego’s own Herb Siguenza with Allison Spratt Pearce & Laura Odette Sandoval



An aging woman leaves her estate to her closest friend creating a cavalcade of opinions and questions regarding culture, racism, and ownership of identity.

Second Stage Reading Series

Hand to God

By Robert Askins

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Adam Daniel, Rebecca Crigler, Durwood Murray, Devin Wade, Sam Ginn & David McBean



One of the most hilarious plays ever produced. After his father’s death, meek Jason finds an outlet for his anxiety at the Christian Puppet Ministry, in the devoutly religious, relatively quiet small town of Cypress, Texas. Jason’s puppet, Tyrone, takes on a shocking and dangerously irreverent personality all its own. Hand to God explores the startlingly fragile nature of faith, morality, and the ties that bind us.

Second Stage Reading Series

Ripcord

By David Lindsay-Abaire

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring John DeCarlo, Samantha Ginn, Connie Jackson, Ron Christopher Jones, Durwood Murray, Daren Scott & Holly Stephenson



A raucous, odd pairing of two entirely different older women in assisted living as they embark upon increasingly emotionally and physically dangerous tricks in order to break each other for a better hospital bed. Secrets are revealed, lives are jeopardized, and peach cobbler is enjoyed. It’s an often slapstick, always surprising comedy, an enemies-to-friends story.

Main Stage Production

Iron

By Rona Munro

Directed by Jacole Kitchen

Starring Rosina Reynold & Kate Rose Reynolds

Featuring Richard P. Trujillo & Jada Alston Owens



The Roustabouts Theatre Co. presents Rona Munro’s IRON, a deeply moving psychological drama first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and extended into a sell-out run at The Royal Court in London. Convicted for life for a brutal murder, Fay has served 15 years of her sentence without a single visitor when her daughter Josie suddenly turns up to visit. Raised by her grandmother, Josie has no memory of the incident that led to her mother’s imprisonment, and has come to uncover the past – a past Fay wishes to forget. Transfixing and disturbing in equal measure, IRON focuses on fractured family, criminal justice, and the mother/daughter bond.

Second Stage Reading Series

Twelve Angry Men

By Reginald Rose

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Lawrence Brown, Sandy Campbell, Roxane Carrasco, Jim Chovick, Melinda Gilb, Samantha Ginn, Ron Christopher Jones, Jason Maddy, David McBean, Durwood Murray, Walter Murray & Milena Phillips

A classic play with modern-day relevancy! Reginald Rose's courtroom drama takes on issues that are still relevant today as 12 jurors deliberate the fate of an accused murderer. Tempers get short, arguments grow heated, and the jurors become 12 angry people. The jurors' final verdict and how they reach it will electrify the audience and keep them on the edge of their seats.

Second Stage Reading Series

The Tale of the Allergist's Wife

A Joint Production with Scripps Ranch Theatre

By Charles Busch

Directed by Kim Strassburger

Featuring Wendy Waddell, Debra Wanger, Phil Johnson, Jill Drexler, Alex Guzman & Kaia Bugler

Marjorie Taub, a middle-aged Upper West Side Doctor’s wife, is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at MOMA and evenings at BAM. Plunged into a mid-life crisis of Medea-like proportions, she’s shaken out of her lethargy by the reappearance of a fascinating and somewhat mysterious childhood friend.

Second Stage Reading Series

Celebration of New Writers of Color

By Carmen Amon, Mabelle Reynoso, Roy Sekigahama, Gill Sotu & Christian St. Croix

Directed by Ron Christopher Jones

Featuring Anise Ritchie, Kris Bona, Walter Murray, Imahni King-Murillo, Arianna Vila & Shirley Johnston

San Diego has a diverse and underrepresented pool of talented playwrights. Part of our mission is to produce new works. TRTC is dedicated to providing experiences and opportunities for BIPOC, AAPI, and Latinx artists and diverse audiences, both onstage and off. Our evening of writers of color includes short new pieces with a discussion afterward. Our team of Co-Producer/Director Ron Jones and Co-Producer Will Cooper bring together local talents in the best light, to introduce you to the next artistic wave.

Main Stage Production

For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls...

By Christopher Durang

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Omri Schein, Wendy Waddell, Walter Murray, Wendy Maples & Christine Hewitt

A night of irreverent sketch comedy from the funniest playwright on Broadway! An evening of 5 hilarious one-act theatrical comedies by the inimitable Durang, writer of the wildly funny Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge. Featuring four of San Diego’s funniest and well-known comic actors, you’ll laugh yourself silly. Fun and fast-moving, a welcome one-two punch to the Quarantine Blues from TRTC. Not always politically correct...but always hysterically entertaining.

Second Stage Reading Series

Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge

By Christopher Durang

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Eileen Bowman, Phil Johnson, Omri Schein, Durwood Murray, Bryan Barbarin, Sue Boland, Teri Brown, Adam Daniel, Hayden Emmerson, Melissa Fernandes, Jo Anne Glover, Ron Christopher Jones, Walter Murray, Alexa Querin, Ben Williams & Wendy Maples

It's the ultimate Christmas party with the drunken Mrs. Bob Cratchit, the bumbling Ghost of Christmas Past, and the eternally cranky Ebenezer Scrooge. They're joined by the rest of Dickens' beloved characters in Durang's mash-up of the season's most beloved stories: A Christmas Carol, The Gift of the Magi, It's a Wonderful Life, and more! 'Tis the season for regret, envy, and greed as Mrs. Bob Cratchit ditches the hubby and the brats for a hilariously twisted adventure all her own.

Main Stage Virtual Production

Book Of Leaves

By Will Cooper

Directed by Kim Strassburger

Featuring Tom Stephenson, Leigh Akin, Justin Lang, Maybelle Shimizu, Durwood Murray, Kandace Crystal & Rebecca Crigler

In this contemporary drama, Walter’s grown children don’t know he’s dying of cancer, and they have secrets of their own. Over the course of a long weekend at his tree-shrouded home, many truths come to light, including what happened to his wife, their mother, who died seventeen years earlier. Conflicting desires and hidden ambitions converge in a suspenseful, emotionally charged story that will surprise, and move, mature audiences.

Main Stage Production

No Way Back

By Mahshid Fashandi Hager

Directed by Fran Gercke

Starring Jessica John

No Way Back is the true story of one family’s desperate escape out of Iran in 1981. We watch through the eyes of ten-year-old Mahshid as her country is cast into revolution, turmoil, and war. Her family’s secret escape out of the country will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last scene.

Second Stage Virtual Reading Series

Senorita Julia

By Matthew Salazar-Thompson

Directed by Dr. Maria Patrice Amon

Featuring Rachael VanWormer, Steven Lone, Carla Navarro, Catalina Maynard, Yvette Angulo, Allyn Moriyon, Dave Rivas, Sofia Sassone & Brian Mackey

In this tragic updated retelling of Strindberg's classic tale of servitude and status, José and Christina live under the auspice of Julia and her father, Mr. Warner, the owner of the Tomlenstein Ranchero. Blending themes from Miss Julie and Percy Shelly's Greek epic Prometheus Unbound, we find that the relationship between a Jewish kept daughter and a Chicano servant escalates to a dangerous consummation in a world that is not ready to accept the differences between class, race, and religion. 

Main Stage Virtual Production

The Mountaintop

By Katori Hall

Directed by Kandace Crystal

Featuring Caiel Noble & Ashley Graham

The American History Theater, The Roustabouts Theatre Co., & Teenage Youth Performing Arts Theatre Company (TYPA) presented The Mountaintop by Katori Hall, a gripping reimagination of events the night before the assassination of the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On April 3, 1968, after delivering one of his most memorable speeches, an exhausted Dr. King retires to his room at the Lorraine Motel while a storm rages outside. When a mysterious stranger arrives with some surprising news, King is forced to confront his destiny and his legacy to his people.