(PHILADELPHIA, PA) -- Lantern Theater Company has announced its upcoming 2025-26 season, which will mark the company’s 32nd year of bringing great stories from great writers to Philadelphia and beyond. The season includes The Real Thing, Macbeth, Blues for An Alabama Sky, and Franklinland - the last two being Philadelphia premieres.
Introducing the 2025-26 season, Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon noted, “These are stories of brilliant people driven by passion and following their hearts’ desires, sometimes blessed with success, sometimes cursed with failure, and sometimes both at once. In each play, we explore that what we love most – and what we will do to get it – are the things that shape our lives, define our character, and reveal our humanity.”
Lantern Theater Company’s 2025-26 Mainstage Season
September 4 – October 5, 2025 | The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, directed by Peter DeLaurier. How do you know when it’s the real thing or a tragic romance? When Tom Stoppard writes a play about a playwright falling in love, you can be sure that comedy and drama will get married – or at least have a serious fling. The Real Thing is Stoppard’s masterful exploration of the human heart, at war with itself and the beloved.
October 30 – December 7, 2025 | Macbeth by William Shakespeare, directed by Charles McMahon. The Fates weave a tangled web for the Thane of Glamis and his Lady. Tempted by a tantalizing prophecy, they risk everything in pursuit of overwhelming ambition and lust for power. For the first time on the Lantern mainstage, Macbeth will bring you into the propulsive action, dazzle you with some of Shakespeare’s most indelible language, and leave you asking what you might give of yourself to achieve your heart’s desire.
February 12 – March 15, 2026 | Blues For An Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, directed by Brett Ashley Robinson (Philadelphia Premiere). Harlem, 1930. The music is hot, and change is in the air. Angel is a talented singer looking for her big break, and her friend Guy wants to design costumes for Josephine Baker. When a southern stranger enters their lives, will he help them reach their dreams or destroy them? Pearl Cleage’s drama of the Harlem Renaissance is mesmerizing, inventive, and soulful.
May 7 – June 7, 2026 | Franklinland by Lloyd Suh, directed by Charles McMahon (Philadelphia Premiere). Benjamin Franklin played many roles: publisher, inventor, political agitator, diplomat – and he wanted his son to follow him into the sciences. When William rebels and becomes the Royal Governor of New Jersey, the stage is set for a father-son conflict of international proportions. Join them for the Philadelphia premiere of Lloyd Suh’s endearing and insightful new play of revolutionary consequences, in the city where it happened.
Season Subscriptions and Flex Packages start at $116 and are available online at www.lanterntheater.org or by calling the Lantern Box Office at (215) 829-0395. Single tickets go on sale in summer 2025.
Founded in 1994, the mission of the Lantern Theater Company is to produce plays that investigate and illuminate what is essential in the human spirit and the spirit of the times. The Lantern serves the Greater Philadelphia region with award-winning productions and education programming, notably partnering with middle schools and high schools in the Philadelphia School District to provide in-classroom residencies in support of curricular learning.
The Lantern became a national leader in streaming theater during the Covid health crisis, producing ten fully designed plays that were created and filmed in the company’s resident home at St. Stephen’s Theater, garnering coverage in national media including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and reaching more than 30,000 people in 15 countries and all 50 states.
