South Coast Repertory is embracing 2026 in a big way. In a unique way. In a memorable way.
The Tony Award-winning theater company is presenting what they rightfully call the theatrical event of the season: a rotating repertory of two Tony Award-winning plays featuring “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee and “God of Carnage” by Yasmina Reza.
This theatrical event runs through March 21 on the Segerstrom Stage. Its eight-week run is the longest in the theatre’s 62-year history. Each play will alternate performances over the run. On Saturdays and Sundays, both plays will be performed: one in the afternoon, the other in the evening
Two of the actors, Kim Martin-Cotten and Brian Vaughn, have lead roles in both plays—an insanely challenging task. The productions share a single set which is modified for each play.
Written 46 years apart, the two masterpieces captured Tony Awards for Best Play; “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1963 and “God of Carnage” in 2009. Both speak to the intersection of marriage, intimacy and how we present ourselves to the world. Both feature meaty roles for actors.
And both fulfill Artistic Director David Ivers’ vision of presenting adventurous programming you can’t find anywhere else.
A veteran of the repertory model from his more than two decades at Utah Shakespeare Festival and Denver Center for the Arts, Ivers brings substantial experience in programming classical theatre together with contemporary theatre and positioning them in dialogue with each other.
This is the second repertory Ivers has programmed at SCR. During the 2022-23 season, he paired “The Little Foxes” by Lillian Hellman with “Appropriate” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The current repertory productions come during the first of three consecutive seasons that will feature a rotating repertory.
Event Driven Theater
“I felt like we needed to make a commitment, both to the classics, but also to the idea of kind of event driven theater,” said SCR Artistic Director David Ivers. “Really putting things together that give an audience a very rare and exceptional experience. And doing two plays in true rep with two actors that travel between both shows and one set of designers on both shows, it really tests the metal of the craft. Engineers test stress on airplane wings, and here we’re testing the bounds of a kind of discipline of craft.”
One of the plays, said Ivers, is a masterwork.
“Virginia Woolf requires incredible stamina of the actors, and it also requires presence of an audience to sit down and partake of a feast,” said Ivers. “And I think doing these two plays together makes sense to me, because they speak to each other in beautiful ways about what happens when you crack the veneer of something that’s seemingly almost perfect from the outside. That feels like Orange County to me, that what’s underneath the surface isn’t as healthy as it appears. And we’re all kind of chasing after something that may or may not be our responsibility to chase after. As an artistic director, I try to think about things that operate on more than one plane of existence—a thing that does more than one thing. So, the rep gives our audiences a chance to root for us, a chance to root for a couple of actors, a chance to be astonished, a chance to within one day or within days of each other have two master works in conversation with each other, and a chance for you to form strong opinions or to be simply transported and well entertained.”
In addition to the matching themes, the plays feature two of the same actors in both plays, a herculean theatrical task as the plays add up to more than five hours of acting and hundreds of pages of dialogue to be memorized. And given that they are two very different characters, the challenge of doing both play in the same day is intensely daunting.
“I come from it as an actor and a director and a producer, that’s where I spent the preponderance of my career is in true rap,” noted Ivers. “It’s a particular kind of Marathon to run, but we have the people that train for that marathon. There’s very little wasted time, and there’s no partying going on.”
The rehearsal schedule could also be called intense. Ivers said it has been complicated but predictable.
“It’s complicated just because it’s what we call long on weeks, but shorter maybe on hours from a regular rehearsal period,” said Ivers. “I sort of created the repertory calendar for here [SCR] based on the experience of doing it so much in my career. These actors are never away from a play for more than a day. So basically, the plays are separated by a dinner break. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. they’re rehearsing one play, and then there’s a dinner break. Then from 4:30 to 8:30 they’re rehearsing the other one every day. That’s six days a week.”
Ultimately, said Ivers, “The rigor and the discipline required by the cast, creative team and the entire organization really makes me proud of SCR and makes me proud to look at the work in this way. I’m really passionate about this. I’m excited to return to something that is an important piece of my growing up in the theatre. To me, there’s so much firepower with these two plays. Both plays are hugely theatrical, both are very funny and both have the ability to hit you in the solar plexus.”
About the Plays
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is considered Albee’s most famous work. Winner of the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play, it ran for more than a year and a half on Broadway and shocked audiences with its take-no-prisoners dialogue and brutally honest look at marriage, intimacy, ambition, naked self-interest and broken dreams. The New York Times described this American classic as “wry and electric!”
In Albee’s landmark drama, George and Martha invite a young couple to their home for a nightcap. As the clock ticks into the wee hours, Nick and Honey find themselves submerged in a cocktail of clever mind games, deep-seated resentments and broken promises. At once hilarious and harrowing, this unflinching portrait of a marriage ceaselessly astonishes audiences with its razor-sharp dialogue and thrilling performances.
“God of Carnage” captured a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy after its West End opening and received the 2009 Tony Award for Best Play. In “God of Carnage,” Reza satirizes parenting, marriage and upper-middle class dynamics in an oft-hilarious manner that is as cutting as it is clever.
In gentrified Brooklyn, a playground fight between 11-year-old boys brings four parents together to resolve their sons’ conflict. At first diplomacy rules, but as each parent reveals their demands, the living room peace summit spirals into a riotous free-for-all of opposing parenting styles, conflicting personalities and marital tensions.
A biting comedy of manners (without the manners), Variety called the play “Elegant, acerbic… Reza’s sharpest work since ‘Art.’”
SCR Managing Director Suzanne Appel said, “Our hope with this theatrical event is to invite our audiences to experience a rare concentration of great storytelling. At a time when we are all in need of shared experiences with our neighbors more than ever, these great works ask us to consider how we present ourselves to our community versus what we hold in the privacy of our most intimate relationships. This is a deeply human question. And one we look forward to exploring with our audiences over the course of eight glorious weeks of extraordinary performances.”
Tickets are now on sale and range in price from $36 to $128, with additional discounts available for educators, seniors and theatregoers aged 25 and under. Some performances include post-show discussions. Tickets may be purchased online at www.scr.org or by phone at (714) 708-5555.
