(LONG BRANCH, NJ) -- New Jersey Repertory Company (NJ Rep), an award-winning incubator for new plays and daring theatrical voices, has announced its 2026 Mainstage Season — a year of intimate, muscular storytelling that dives into reinvention, reckoning, genius, and the tangled threads of family history. The season includes three World Premieres and one Northeast Premiere.
Artistic Director SuzAnne Barabas and Executive Producer Gabor Barabas unveil a slate of four powerful productions, each guided by a top-tier creative team and featuring artists whose work is seen on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in regional theatres throughout the country.
“Each of these plays asks us to step closer — to really look at the lives in front of us,” said SuzAnne Barabas. “They’re funny, fierce, surprising, human. It’s a season of truth-telling.”
Samantha Inside Out (February 19 – March 15, 2026) - World Premiere. Written by Marisa Smith; Directed by Theresa Rebeck; Starring Jayne Atkinson. Samantha, a woman of a certain age has had it with her current life. She’s a high school English teacher, mother of grown kids, and the wife of a cruel, pompous, philandering college professor. After a humiliating encounter with him at a party, Samantha flees the scene and lands in the host’s daughter’s bedroom. Feeling sorry for herself, she opens up, revealing secrets and reviewing the wreckage of her life.
Sins Of The Mother (April 9 – May 3, 2026) - North East Premiere. Written by Israel Horovitz; Directed by Evan Bergman. A group of earthy, brawling, self-sufficient street-talkers who live by their hands, be that in work or violence confront Douggie, a young man who has returned to the small fishing town where they all grew up. Everyone knows everyone in Gloucester and newcomers need to prove themselves. Douggie must prove to all concerned that he was born in Gloucester and that his mother lived and died there. In doing so, he is drawn into a mystery that threatens to reveal secrets from everyone’s past, and tells a powerful story about unfinished wars that play themselves out with humor, passion and revenge.
The Vienna Lessons (June 4 – June 28, 2026)- World Premiere. Written by Jack Canfora; Directed by Evan Bergman. Vienna, 1787. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, at the height of his powers but struggling financially, meets a serious and supremely confident teenager who wants to hire him as a teacher, Ludwig Van Beethoven. This comic-drama imagines how the relationship between two of music’s towering geniuses (whom many scholars believe met in real life) might have evolved. Featuring some of the great works of each composer, as well as some brilliantly imagined ‘collaborations’, The Vienna Lessons shows how these two men, separated by temperament and age, nonetheless find in each other the unique bond only true visionaries can share..
A Change Of Position (July 30 – August 23, 2026) - World Premiere. Written by Jeffrey Sweet; Directed by James Glossman. There are easier things than being a teenage girl living in a trailer park in Pennsylvania with a mom who pays the bills by sleeping with your classmates’ fathers. The situation becomes even more complicated when one of her mother’s "clients" makes a strange offer.
TICKETS & INFORMATION - Subscriptions and single tickets for the 2026 Season will go on sale soon. Visit www.njrep.org or call 732-229-3166 for updates, tickets, and special events.
New Jersey Repertory Company (NJRep) was founded in 1997 by SuzAnne and Gabor Barabas. Its current central headquarters is the Lumia Theater, located on lower Broadway in Long Branch. The theater's mission is to develop and produce new plays and to make a lasting contribution to the American Stage. Over two decades, NJ Rep has produced 152 plays, of which 128 have been world premieres. The theater has the additional distinction of having had many of its plays produced by other theaters around the country, totaling over 200 subsequent productions in the US and overseas.
In 2012 and 2018, NJ Rep received a National Theater Company Grant from the American Theater Wing that sponsors the annual Tony Awards for Broadway in recognition of its contribution to the repertoire of the American Stage. Only seven theaters have had this distinction. In addition, the theater has presented over 400 developmental readings as well as introduced 136 new works through its Theatre Brut Short-Play Festivals that focus on visionary and avant-garde works. NJRep acquired a new property, a 28,000 square foot school situated on 2 ½ acres and located just five minutes from its Main Stage Lumia Theater and two blocks from the Jersey Shore. The theater plans on gradually transforming the school in stages into a cultural center that will house additional performance spaces, an art cinema, an art museum, a rooftop café, an arts education wing, and residences for out-of-town actors and playwrights. When completed, the center will present a wide array of programs in acting, playwriting, art, sculpture, poetry, music, and photography and will serve as a catalyst for economic development and as the foundation for the cultural renaissance of the community.
NJ Rep thanks the following for their support: Shubert Foundation, Stone Foundation of New Jersey, Community Foundation of New Jersey and New Jersey State Council in the Arts.
