Oratorio for Living Things and More Announced for Signature Theatre Season

Signature Theatre announced its 35th anniversary season, artistic director Emily Shooltz’s first year of programming. The 2025-26 season includes the latest work from resident Lauren Yee and its first two productions from its newest resident, Heather Christian.

The season begins in the fall with Obie-winning composer and playwright Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things, which Shooltz commissioned and developed with Christian at Ars Nova. In Oratorio, Christian infuses a classical oratorio with a blend of blues, gospel, jazz, and soul and peels back layers of what it means to be alive on both a human and a cosmic scale. The Ars Nova production’s creative team, including director Lee Sunday Evans, returns at Signature, following a world premiere that was cut short by the pandemic, and a second presentation that lost performances to COVID-related cancellations.

In Mother Russia, running in the winter, Yee (Cambodian Rock Band) again uses humor to explore the aftermath of tyranny. Set in St. Petersburg in 1992, Mother Russia follows Evgeny, a young man who stumbles into a job working surveillance with his old friend Dmitri. Their target: Katya, a former pop singer with questionable allegiances and a mysterious past. As their lives intertwine, Evgeny finds himself falling in love and losing his bearings, all while grappling with the taste of freedom (and fast food) along the way.

Christian’s Oratorio about all things living will be inversely echoed at the end of the season with an off-Broadway premiere of her requiem Animal Wisdom. Originally conceived to be performed by Christian (and performed by her in its 2017 world premiere at Bushwick Starr), at Signature, the reimagining will be performed by other performers in director Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s new production.

For its 35th anniversary season, Signature Theatre will launch Next Act Campaign, a $10 million campaign to broaden Signature’s impact to a multi-generational community of artists. The campaign will fund the launch of a Legacy Lab for Signature’s community of alumni residents by continuing to be a home for their work and ideas after their residencies are complete, a New Works Fund devoted to commissioning and developing world premiere productions, an Artistic Director’s Discretionary Fund to supplement production budgets for ambitious, large-scale projects, and a Stabilization Fund to provide operating budget support for 2025-28, a short-term boost to the organization’s fiscal health as it continues to recover from the losses catalyzed by the pandemic.