Julia Weber
Staff Writer
Chautauqua Theater Company’s final mainstage production of the season The Witnesses will take the stage with two preview performances at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Bratton Theater.
Amid a reigning apocalyptic plague, The Witnesses finds five individuals united through a weekly support group to explore the power of found community through care and companionship.
During the first summer in her role at CTC’s helm, Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll commissioned C. A. Johnson as playwright. Johnson spent a week during the 2023 season on the grounds writing what would eventually become The Witnesses and taking in the ample theater programming, then returned the following summer to present the script as a New Play Workshop, then titled Tell Me You’re Dying (or the trial of millicent bonhomme).
Carroll said that when she stepped into her role at CTC, she wanted to provide a space for emerging playwrights to commit time and energy to their craft and make CTC a space for new works. As director, she started a commissioning program in which playwrights are granted time to write, time to workshop the script and time to fully produce the play.
“One of the reasons I was excited about becoming the artistic director at Chautauqua Theater was for the opportunity to support playwrights in a really fulsome way,” Carroll said. “So many of those opportunities are not available anymore for playwrights.”
Carroll said Johnson seemed like the right artist to be the inaugural playwright for this undertaking.
“I believe in her as an artist; I like what she has to say; I like the way she uses language, and I thought that the Chautauqua community would be interested not just in her language, but in the ideas that she puts in place,” Carroll said.
As the first completed commissioned project of this type, The Witnesses returns once more to the Bratton stage as a world premiere.
“What was lovely about this process is Jade and Laura (Savia, vice president of performing and visual arts) and Deborah (Sunya Moore, senior vice president and chief program officer) and everybody were so gung-ho about the play in a way that actually felt genuine,” Johnson said.
Johnson said she is excited to share the play with new and returning audiences alike for them to experience the finalized production.
“It’s been nice to come back and exciting to be building a production that some people are going to see for the first time, but (also that) a lot of people saw,” she said.
Carroll, knowing that the play would be part of the 2025 program lineup, wanted to ensure that each work of the summer theater season would speak to each other and speak to the current cultural moment. For her, curating the selection of mainstage plays and NPWs brought forth an exploration of the many ways in which community manifests and how individuals choose to engage — or not to — in the communities in which they find themselves.
She said she thought The Witnesses’ central theme of chosen community will resonate deeply with viewers who choose the community of Chautauqua each summer.
“I think that is something that speaks very well to Chautauqua, which is a place of chosen community and a place of ideas,” she said. “It felt like a conversation about how we take care of each other, how we live with the clock ticking — how we choose to live, how we choose to love, how we choose to take care of each other,” she said.
For Carroll, The Witnesses instills a prescient and timely message for Chautauqua.
“I think this is a summer where we need to remember that we’re a community that is choosing to come together,” she said, “to talk, to disagree, to agree, to move forward from all of our different perspectives.”
