The Dorset Playhouse opens its 49th season on June 19 with a “Gaslight” thriller and a comedy lineup stacked with Broadway and screen names - Katie Lowes, Theresa Rebeck, Kenneth Lonergan and more - and a whole company already at work behind the curtain.
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a 298-seat room built out of pre-Revolutionary barns, right before something frightening happens on stage. Dorset Theatre Festival is counting on it. The festival opens its 49th season on June 19 with “Deceived,” a new thriller built from the bones of “Gaslight,” and Executive Artistic Director Will Rucker makes no apology for putting a scary play first.
“There’s something about it like Friday night at the drive-in - that exciting, maybe even old-fashioned night-at-the-theater feeling,” Rucker says. “It harkens back to our history here, and to the tradition of theatrical storytelling. It’s a good way to kick-start a season with some excitement and suspense.”
He has reason to lead with confidence. Last summer was the best at the box office in the festival’s history - more than 10,000 people came through the Playhouse doors - and 2026 is the last season before a milestone. In 2027, Dorset turns 50, half a century in which a rural Vermont barn became one of the country’s most influential launching pads for new plays. Martyna Majok’s “The Cost of Living” went from a reading here to the Pulitzer Prize; we told that story, and the economics behind it, in last year’s feature on the festival.
“We’re really trying to take this sustainability thing seriously, so we can get to our next fifty years,” says Managing Creative Director Ryan Koss. The lineup is built to do two things at once: bring regulars back and give newcomers an easy reason to make the drive. As Rucker describes it, good programming balances “things we know people want to see, things we think they might like to see, and things I want them to see just because.” This year that adds up to one thriller and three comedies.
Drive past the Playhouse this month and the first thing you notice is the tent. It goes up on day one and roughly doubles the size of the scene shop inside the building. “That’s the signal that we’re here,” Rucker says. Behind it, a company of about 35 people hit the ground the day after Memorial Day and has been building the summer ever since - sets, costumes, lights, and sound, all made in the same building, alongside the box office and marketing crews getting the season in front of audiences.
Some of that work looks less like art and more like a treasure hunt. For “Deceived,” the props team has been combing Facebook Marketplace and driving to antique stores around the region, photographing gothic furniture and sending it back to the designer for a yea or nay. It is the unglamorous engine behind a very polished result. “The more authentic the production, the scarier it will be,” Rucker says.
The building itself is a shared one. The Dorset Players, the community theater group that owns the historic Playhouse, use it most of the year; the festival moves back in each spring, unpacks out of storage, and raises that tent. Turning the space over into the festival every summer, Koss says, has become part of the brand - a signal that the season has arrived.
Before “gaslighting” was a term people tossed around, it was a plot. “Deceived” is a new adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller “Gaslight” - the play that gave us the word - set in fog-bound 1901 London, where a young bride notices the gas lamps dimming on their own, footsteps in empty rooms, small objects moved out of place. Her husband insists she is imagining all of it.
What’s changed is the ending. Adapted by Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson, this version lets the woman rescue herself. “In the original, a male character comes in and saves the wife,” Rucker says. “In this version, adapted by two women, Bella saves herself, with the help of another woman. It’s women banding together.” Director Jackson Gay, who staged the festival’s white-knuckle “Misery” in 2023, is back, and in a room this size the scares land close. Rucker still remembers a “Misery” patron who went home with fake blood across her white suit. “I like when that kind of thing happens.”
The festival’s resident playwright, Theresa Rebeck, lives just up the road in Dorset Hollow, and this summer she is doing something she rarely does: directing her own work. “The Understudy” is her fast, sharp backstage comedy about a struggling actor who lands an understudy spot in a long-lost Kafka play on Broadway - until a swaggering Hollywood star storms into rehearsal and a stage manager scrambles to keep the whole thing from collapsing.
Rebeck is the most Broadway-produced female playwright working today, with five plays on Broadway and a long history at Dorset. For this production she revisited a script she first wrote more than fifteen years ago and aged the characters up into their late fifties and sixties. “It’s going to be hilarious, given the cast we have,” Rucker says. The run is a short one - 11 performances only - and features stage veterans Jeffrey Bean and Elizabeth Heflin alongside W. Tré Davis of CBS’s “Fire Country.”
If “Deceived” is the white-knuckle one, “Advice” is the laugh-out-loud one - “slow food for the people who loved ‘The Book Club Play’ last year,” as Rucker puts it. At an anniversary dinner, Ron and Joy’s evening goes sideways when Gary - freshly divorced, deeply chaotic, and a newly self-appointed life coach - turns up pitching a self-help book he wrote called “How to Maximize the Most Successful You.” His own life, of course, is a wreck.
The draw for a lot of ticket buyers will be the couple at the center: Katie Lowes, who played Quinn Perkins across seven seasons of “Scandal,” and her real-life husband Adam Shapiro, currently on the Emmy-winning “The Bear.” “It’s always helpful to have somebody with familiar credits,” Rucker says, “and Katie’s a great actress.” She has Vermont ties, too - her mother teaches yoga in Manchester - and the family is driving across the country from California for the run. Adrienne Campbell-Holt, a seven-time Dorset director, directs the New England premiere, fresh off its national rolling world premiere.
The season closes with Kenneth Lonergan, the writer who won an Oscar for “Manchester by the Sea.” “Lobby Hero” plays out almost entirely in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building, where a drifting security guard, his by-the-book boss, and two mismatched cops get pulled into the wake of an off-stage murder. It is funny, and then it is not.
“There are very funny parts, but more than that, it’s human,” Rucker says. “It’s not quite a mystery - it’s a puzzler. A lot of questions about truth: what constitutes truth, what’s your responsibility if you know it.” Lonergan’s play had a celebrated 2018 Broadway revival with Chris Evans and Michael Cera; at Dorset it gets a four-person staging directed by M. Bevin O’Gara, who spent fifteen years at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. Koss sees it as the right closer - the season opens on pure theatrical thrill and ends on a masterwork with something to chew on. “Questions of good and evil are always appropriate for the theater,” Rucker says.
Part of the draw of a show at Dorset has always been everything around it - the drive in, the barn, the dinner after. This year the festival’s neighbors are leaning in: the Dorset Inn and Barrows House plan to keep one of their properties open after each performance, so there is somewhere to land for a drink or a late bite. A couple of the shows run under 90 minutes, which leaves room to flip the usual order and eat afterward.
There is also the festival’s biggest night of the year. The fifth annual Dance Party Ball lands Saturday, July 25 at the Old Gray Barn, headlined by Broadway’s Desi Oakley (“Waitress,” “Chicago”), with a DJ, open bar, and auction. It is the festival’s largest fundraiser, and in a year spent shoring up the finances for that 50th season, every bit helps. So does simply showing up. Koss’s first ask is the easy one: “Buy a ticket and come have fun.” Rucker has a second one worth borrowing - if you love the place, buy a ticket for someone who has never been. “Even if you don’t go with them,” he says. “It’s a place you care about.”
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Dorset Theatre Festival’s 49th season runs June 19 through September 5 at the Dorset Playhouse, 104 Cheney Rd, Dorset, VT:
Single tickets and subscriptions are on sale now at dorsettheatrefestival.org or through the box office at (802) 867-2223. The Dance Party Ball is July 25 at the Old Gray Barn.
