SMUDS has had a very eclectic mix of productions over the past 50 years: from tragedy to comedy; drama to farce.  Listed below are the productions performed over the past 50 years.  Besides the full-scale spring productions, there are a number of years where the Drama Society hit the ground running, opting to stage a production in the fall.

For plot information, titles highlighted blue can be clicked on, or you can scroll down to the bottom of the page....
 
 

1954	Stalag 17 Journey's End	1955	Harvey	1956	My Three Angels
1957	The Desperate Hours	1958	Casualty South of Manila	1959	The Blood is Strong
1960	The Winslow Boy	1961	Mary Stuart	1962	Teahouse of the August Moon
1963	Charley's Aunt	1964	Reclining Figure	1965	The Man Who Came to Dinner
1966	She Stoops to Conquer	1967	Cyrano de Bergerac	1968	Stalag 17
1969	Laura	1970	Becket	1971	Rosencrantz & Gildernstern are Dead Marat Sade
1972	Playboy of the Western World	1973	The Taming of the Shrew Three to Get Married	1974	Arsenic and Old Lace See How They Run
1975	The Shadow of a Gunman Arms and the Man	1976	Under Milkwood	1977	The Happiest Days of Your Life The Ghost Train
1978	She Stoops to Conquer Outside Inside Alice	1979	MacBeth The Importance of Being Ernest	1980	Pygmalion The Man Who Came to Dinner
1981	The Norman Conquets Riders to the Sea The Public Eye	1982	Lady Windermere's Fan The Happiest Days of Your Life	1983	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Pride and Prejudice
1984	The Diary of Anne Frank Wait Until Dark	1985	Ready When You Are, C.B.! Death Trap	1986	Twain by the Tail Verdict
1987	Come Away Death Play it Again, Sam	1988	Dirty Work at the Crossroads Crimes of the Heart	1989	Harvey The Wisdom of Eve
1990	Les Liasons Dangereuses The Crucible	1991	My Son the Lawyer is Drowning A Streetcar Named Desire	1992	The Creature Creeps! 7 Stories
1993	The Dining Room Who am I This Time?	1994	The Trial of Steven Truscott	1995	The Taming of the Shrew
1996	MacBeth	1997	The Day They Shot John Lennon	1998	A Constant Garden for Mrs. MacGregor
1999	The Nerd	2000	A Streetcar Named Desire	2001	The Crucible
2002	Psycho Beach Party! Blue Window	2003	Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)	2004	SUBMIT YOUR PLAY FOR CONSIDERATION!!!!!!!!!!

 

Arms and the Man
    A mercenary soldier, Bluntschli, breaks into the bedroom of Raina Petkoff and disrupts her idyllic romance with Sergius Saranov.  The       play mocks the idealism of both love and war.

Arsenic and Old Lace
    The plot revolves around two old ladies who invite men to their home in Brooklyn, only to poison them with elderberry wine.  The bodies are quietly buried by their brother, who thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt, until a homicidal nephew arrives with his own corpse to conceal.

Beckett
    Description is unavailable.

The Blood is Strong
    Description is unavailable.

Blue Window
    Description is unavailable.

Casualty South of Manila
    Description is unavailable.

Charley’s Aunt
    This play follows Lord Fancourt-Babberley who is persuaded to impersonate the aunt of his scheming friend, Charles; various complications ensue when the real aunt returns from Brazil.

Come Away Death
    Description is unavailable.

A Constant Garden for Mrs. MacGregor
    Description is unavailable.

The Creature Creeps!
    Description is unavailable.

Crimes of the Heart
    Warmhearted, irreverent, zany and brilliantly imaginative, the play teems with humanity and humor as it examines the plight of three young Mississippi sisters betrayed by their passions.

The Crucible
    Ostensibly a play about the Salem witch trials that took place in 1693, resulting in the deaths of 20 people, it was intended as a veiled criticism of the anti-communist purge instituted in the US by Senator McCarthy.

Cyrano de Bergerac
    The eponymous hero, embarrassed by his long nose, nobly refrains from declaring his love for Roxane and encourages her romance with his rival Christian.

The Day They Shot John Lennon
    Comprised of a deftly blended series of encounters between a group of strangers who assemble at the site of John Lennon’s assassination, the play captures the sense of shock and uncomprehending loss which followed that awful event.

Death Trap
    Description is unavailable.

The Desperate Hours
    Description is unavailable.

The Diary of Anne Frank
    The play is based on the well-known diary of Anne Frank, a 13-year old Jewish girl, who lived in hiding with her parents and family friends for three years during World War II before being found and sent to a concentration camp, where she died.

The Dining Room
    A brilliantly conceived and richly humorous theatrical tour de force in which six (or more) performers portray a wide array of diverse characters as they delineate the dying lifestyle of wealthy WASPdom, and the now neglected room which was once a vital center of family
life.

Dirty Work at the Crossroads
    Description is unavailable.

The Ghost Train
    Description is unavailable.

The Happiest Days of Your Life
    Description is unavailable.

Harvey
    When Elwood P. Dowd starts to introduce his imaginary friend, Harvey, a six-and-a-half-foot rabbit, to guests at a society party, his sister, Veta, has seen as much of his eccentric behavior as she can tolerate. She decides to have him committed to spare their family from
future embarrassment. Problems arise, however, when Veta herself is mistakenly assumed to be on the verge of lunacy when she explains to doctors that years of living with Elwood’s hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also! The doctors commit Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out, the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion.

The Importance of Being Ernest
    Jack Worthing’s Friend Algernon assumes the identity of Ernest, Jack’s fictitious younger brother, in order to court Jack’s ward.  To add to Jack’s difficulties, Lady Bracknell refuses consent to his marriage to her daughter on account of his uncertain lineage.

Journey’s End
    Description is unavailable.

Lady Windermere’s Fan
    Description is unavailable.

Laura
    When Mark McPherson first falls in love with Laura, he knows he’s in love with a phantom—for Laura is dead, and he’s in charge of her murder investigation. When she appears in the midst of a thunderstorm, very much alive after all, it is revealed that Laura’s best friend (and rival) was the true victim of the crime. But now, all evidence seems to point to Laura’s guilt. Despite his growing love for her—a love which Laura seems to return—Mark is about to pin the crime on her, when the real murderer appears and tries to do away with the girl he meant to kill in the first place—Laura.

Les Liasons Dangereuses
    Description is unavailable.

Macbeth
    Macbeth depicts the central character’s disintegration as he wins power abetted by his ambitious wife and then, struggling with both his own conscience and the forces of destiny, loses it through his use of violence.

The Man Who Came to Dinner
    The play revolves around an acid-tongued radio announcer (based of the critic Alexander Woollcot) who breaks his hip on tour and is forced to stay with a family in the suburbs for several weeks.  During his stay he terrorizes the family with his fussiness and pomposity.

The Marat/Sade
    Description is unavailable.

Mary Stuart
A conflict raged for twenty years between Elizabeth of England and Mary Stuart, during which the destiny of England as an independent
nation of free people trembled in the balance. Elizabeth struggles over whether to keep her cousin Mary alive or to execute her. Each course
seems to be of equal peril. The play is by turns a testament to human bravery and personal dignity; a conflict between personal and political
responsibility; a struggle between womanhood and statesmanship, where Mary triumphs at one and Elizabeth the other.

My Son the Lawyer is Drowning
    Description is unavailable.

My Three Angels
Three convicts are employed as roofers by a family whose roof is in desperate need of maintenance. On the way from France is an evil-minded cousin to oust the father of the family from his business and his cold-blooded nephew, who is jilting the father’s daughter for an heiress. The three convicts—two of them murderers, the third a swindler—take the visitors on. All three have warm hearts, and are passionate believers in true justice. Possessing every criminal art and penal grace, they set matters right and in so doing redeem themselves as real life angels to the grateful family.

The Nerd
    Now an aspiring young architect, Willum Cubbert has often told his friends about the debt he owes to Rick Steadman, a fellow ex-GI whom he has never met but who saved has life after he was seriously wounded in Vietnam. He has written to Rick to say that, as long as he is alive, “you will have somebody on Earth who will do anything for you”—so Willum is delighted when Rick shows up unexpectedly at his apartment on the night of his thirty-fourth birthday party. But his delight soon fades as it becomes apparent that Rick is a hopeless “nerd”—a bumbling oaf with no social sense, little intelligence and less tact. As Rick stays, his continued presence among Willum and his friends leads to one uproarious incident after another, until the normally placid Willum finds himself contemplating violence—a dire development which, happily, is staved off by the surprising “twist” ending of the play.

The Norman Conquests
    Description is unavailable.

Outside Inside Alice
    Description is unavailable.

Play it Again, Sam
    Description is unavailable.

Playboy of the Western World
    A young man, Christy Mahon, arrives fearfully in a Mayo village, claiming that he has killed his domineering father.  Christy is welcomed as a hero by the local women until his supposedly dead father turns up in pursuit of him.

Pride and Prejudice
    Description is unavailable.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
    Description is unavailable.

Psycho Beach Party!
    Description is unavailable.

Pygmalion
    The plot, concerning the social transformation of the cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, by the professor of linguistics, Henry Higgins, provided the basis for the musical My Fair Lady.

Ready When You Are, C.B.!
    Description is unavailable.

Reclining Figure
As told by Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune: “Playwright Harry Kurnitz has hit upon a background that generates its own chaos: the
sleek, effusive and cheerfully dishonest world of the art experts. He has set up a gullible millionaire who keeps ten-cent cigars in a twelve hundred dollar spice chest and who is fond of collecting the recent masters.  He runs him afoul of a high-pressure dealer who is given to crying like a baby when parting with his treasures, a hard-drinking ‘restorer’ with a talent for forgery and a soft-headed young salesman with high ideals and, unfortunately, a hot property on his hands. The chicanery pyramids with an easy logic, throats are cut with casual charm,” and the intrigue mounts delightfully as romance and art mix to everyone’s satisfaction.

Riders to the Sea
    The play concerns an old woman, Maurya, and her fatalistic acceptance of the implacable force of nature after losing all her men-folk at sea.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
    Two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet pass their time in talk while the tragic events of the drama take place off stage.  The play is an ingenious  and witty exploration of the themes of identity and fate in the tradition of Beckett and Pirandello.

7 Stories
    Description is unavailable.

The Shadow of a Gunman
    The central character, Donal Davoreen, is caught up in the conflict between Irish Republicans and the British army; the play explores ideas of patriotism, deception, and self-knowledge.

She Stoops to Conquer
    Tony Lumpkin directs Young Marlow and his friend to the Hardcastle’s house, having led them to believe it is an inn.  There they treat Hardcastle as the landlord and his daughter Kate as one of the servants.

Stalag 17
This “turbulent and gutsy play” shows a group of American prisoners lodged in a German prison camp, trying to escape, to embarrass and irritate their captors.

A Streetcar Named Desire
    Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer prize, it follows Blance’s mental disintegration in the face of her brother-in-law Stanley’s brutality, and is the central theme of the play.

Taming of the Shrew
    Ostensibly a broad comedy of love and marriage, the play comments, through the enforced subservience of Katherina (the ‘Shrew’) by Petruchio, upon the role of women in society.

Teahouse of the August Moon
    Description is unavailable.

Three to Get Married
    Description is unavailable.

Trial of Steven Truscott
    Description is unavailable

Twain by the Tail
    Description is unavailable.

Under Milk Wood
    Although written originally as a radio play, this depiction of life in the Welsh town of Llaregub has often been presented on stage.

Verdict
    Description is unavailable.

Wait Until Dark
    A sinister con man and two ex-convicts are about to meet their match. They have traced the location of a mysterious doll, which they are much interested in, to the apartment of Sam Hendrix, and his blind wife, Susy. Sam had apparently been persuaded by a strange woman to transport the doll across the Canadian border, not knowing that sewn inside were several grams of heroin. When the woman is murdered the situation becomes more urgent. The con man and his ex-convicts convince Susy that the police have implicated Sam in the woman’s murder, and the doll, which she believes is the key to his innocence, is evidence. She refuses to reveal its location, and with the help of a young neighbor, figures out she is the victim of a bizarre charade. But when Roat kills his associates, a deadly game of cat and mouse ensues between the two. Susy knows the only way to play fair is by her rules, so when darkness falls she turns off all the lights leaving both of them to maneuver in the dark until the game ends.

The Winslow Boy
    Based on an actual case, the play depicts a father’s attempts to clear the reputation of his son – a cadet at a naval college – after he has been accused of petty theft.

Wisdom of Eve
    When we first meet Eve Harrington she is standing in the rain by the stage door of the theatre in which the renowned Margo Crane is starring in her latest long-run hit. Waiting for a glimpse of her professed idol she accosts Karen Roberts, Margo’s good friend and the wife of the playwright, Lloyd Roberts, and inveigles an invitation to meet the great actress herself.  The meeting leads to unexpected opportunity as Margo, struck with Eve’s “sincerity,” takes her on as a personal secretary. Before long Eve has done such a fine job of straightening out the clutter of Margo’s personal affairs that Margo, while she had always jealously resisted the engagement of an understudy for her own role, allows Eve to have the assignment. Then Eve begins to move ahead in earnest, her true character emerging as she lies, cheats and blackmails her way to Broadway stardom—and then a Hollywood career—leaving the wreckage of her friends’ trust behind her. As the play ends there are rumors that Eve has found a new “friend,” this time a movie tycoon, so it appears that perhaps we have not, for the moment, heard all there is to tell about Eve.

Who am I This Time?
    Description is unavailable.