Join us for the 2025-2026 Philadelphia Theatre Research Symposium!
The Work That Sustains Us: Theatre and the Environment
This year’s theme revolves around the connections between theatre and environmental sustainability. What is the theatre’s role in environmental sustainability? How has theatre and performance responded to climate change? What methods has the theatre industry used to provoke thought about this important topic, and how has it modeled change?
This year’s keynote is Pulitzer Prize-finalist Lisa D’Amour, whose work has often focused on the theatre’s role in both social and physical environments.
At 7 pm: The first concert reading of Middleground, a new musical by Michael Hollinger and Robert Maggio
----------------------------------------------------------------
Lisa D’Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary collaborator from New Orleans, Louisiana. She grew up in a world of ritual, activism, group spectacle and care, all of which continue to thrive in her work. Her plays have been produced in theaters across the globe, including MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, Playwrights Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.), The National Theater (London) Catastrophic Theater (Houston) and ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans). Her play Detroit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Susan Smith Blackburn prize, and she’s received two OBIE Awards. Lisa’s company PearlDamour makes interdisciplinary, often site-specific works, most recently premiering Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown (American Repertory Theater + touring). She has also been honored with the Alpert Award for the Arts, the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.
Middleground
a concert reading of a new musical by Michael Hollinger & Robert Maggio
Smith Performance Lab, Mullen Center for the Performing Arts, 7 pm
Middleground is a new musical set 40 years after a great catastrophe. Two nations remain, separated by a once-great river: the technology-driven Montonna, which controls the highlands, and the agrarian Vallé in the lowlands. The river is central to the lives of both peoples, and increasing drought has made water resources an inflammatory issue on both sides. This is exacerbated by Montanna’s new dam, which controls the river’s flow as it makes its way from the highlands to the lowlands. (The show takes its name from an island in the middle of the river, forbidden to citizens on both sides.)
Middleground is centered on two families, one from each nation, but addresses larger issues that challenge our 21st century world, such as environmental exploitation, the relationship of corporate culture to politics, the clash of generational perspectives, and the pitfalls of binary thinking. As tensions rise and the prospect of armed conflict looms, existential questions come into focus: Will one nation prevail through the collapse of the other? Will both be doomed by the ravages of war? Or can they avert disaster by finding a “middle ground” that allows them to work together and transform scarcity into sufficiency?
Estimated running time: 100 minutes (no intermission).
……
Michael Hollinger is a playwright, lyricist and composer. His plays -- including Opus, Red Herring, Ghost-Writer, Incorruptible, and Cyrano (translated and co-adapted with Aaron Posner) -- have been staged throughout the U.S., in NYC, and abroad. Musicals include TouchTones (co-authored with Robert Maggio), A Wonderful Noise (co-authored with Vance Lehmkuhl), and Moon Over the Brewery (co-authored with Bruce Graham and Robert Maggio). Awards include an ATCA/Steinberg New Play Citation, two Edgerton Foundation New Play Awards, an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award and four Barrymore Awards. Michael is Professor of Theatre at Villanova University.
Passionate, versatile, and engaging, composer Robert Maggio embraces music as a deeply collaborative and communicative art. Equally at home writing for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and the stage, his work spans concert music, dance, and musical theatre. Hailed as “smart, vital, and inventive,” Maggio’s music is lyrical, rhythmically charged, and widely performed across North America. His collaborators include the Boston Pops, Philadelphia Orchestra, Pennsylvania Ballet, and numerous professional theaters. A member of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, he co-created Far from the Tree, winner of a 2024 Richard Rodgers Award. Maggio is Professor of Composition at West Chester University.