With the 2023-2024 academic year just finished, the Brigham Young University theater department is already looking forward to next year.

BYU Theatre on Monday revealed its full performance slate including two shows apiece in October and November plus one in March and April, along with an additional spring show.

The shows will be held in the BYU West Campus theaters — West Campus Mainstage Theatre, West Campus Studio Theatre and West Campus Black Box Theatre — for the upcoming year, and likely for the foreseeable future. This will be the second slate of performances since the closing and demolition of the Harris Fine Arts Center at BYU, a fixture for decades in campus performing arts.

“After a tremendously successful first season in the West Campus venues, BYU Theatre is tailoring its 2023-2024 season to these innovative new spaces and its resilient and creative student and faculty collaborators,” BYU Theatre Artistic Director Stephanie Breinholt said in a press release. “The upcoming season will explore a variety of genres and styles.”

The October productions will be “Wait Until Dark” and the Microburst New Play Festival. “Wait Until Dark” was first performed on Broadway in 1966, released on film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1967 and was last performed at BYU in 1987, according to Breinholt. The show is about a blind housewife who is targeted by three con men after criminal misdoings by her since-murdered husband.

The Microburst New Play Festival is an annual showcase of student writing and performance that works to highlight young artists and allows people to “become acquainted with the next generation of playwrights who will change the world.”

November’s offerings include the English children’s classic “The Secret Garden” and “The Boy at the Edge of Everything,” which will be performed by Young Company, BYU’s touring troupe for children. “The Secret Garden” is a musical based off the story first published as a novel in 1911 about a 10-year-old girl orphaned after her parents died of cholera. It will be performed at BYU for the first time since 1999.

“The Boy at the Edge of Everything” is a junior theater mainstay, performed across the country by high schools and colleges since its first showing in 2014. This fall’s offering will be the first performance of the show at BYU.

The first production of 2024 will be March’s showing of “The House of Desires,” which, according to BYU, is a “wild tale of confusion and mistaken identity complete with wily servants and witless nobles.” It was first written by 16th-century Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz. This will be the show’s first performance at BYU.

Over eight days in April, audiences will be afforded an opportunity to see “The Tempest” as the department’s annual Shakespeare show. “The Tempest,” which has not been performed at BYU since 2009, will also be done by the Young Company.

The final show of the spring will be “Blithe Sprit,” a Noël Coward play about a socialite and a seance-gone-wrong. First performed in London’s West End in 1941, it has not graced a BYU stage since 1988.

Season tickets will go on sale next Wednesday and can be purchased online or in person at the Marriott Center box office. Single-show tickets will be available at a later date.

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