Time and the Broadways: A Look at the Theatre's Extensive Exploration of Time

Roundabout Theatre Company presents the new Broadway production of J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways, directed by Tony winner Rebecca Taichman. Time and the Conways returns to Broadway for the first time since its premiere in 1938.

In 1919 Britain, Mrs. Conway is full of optimism during her daughter's lavish twenty-first birthday celebration. The Great War is over, wealth is in the air, and the family's dreams bubble over like champagne.

Jump nineteen years into the future, though, and the Conways' lives have transformed unimaginably. This time-jumping play by J.B. Priestley takes place at the crossroads of today and tomorrow-challenging our notions of choice, chance and destiny.

The question of time has been a central theme in theatrical works throughout the centuries, and one that has been explored extensively on Broadway in recent seasons.

Time is central to so many of our works because it is central to life. Creeping seamlessly into even our cheeriest offerings as characters explore questions of change, mortality, creativity, love, and self. At the center of every human story, there is time. The ticking clock by which we mark our every move, a constant reminder of our simultaneous potential and fallibility.

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Indecent

Co-created and directed by Time and the Conways Tony Award-winning director, Rebecca Taichman, Paula Vogel's Indecent is inspired by the true story of the controversial 1923 Broadway debut of Sholem Asch's The God of Vengenace, charting the journey of an incendiary drama and the artists who risked their lives to perform it.

The Last Five Years

Jason Robert Brown's contemporary musical The Last Five Years tells the emotionally powerful story of two twenty-something New Yorkers who dive head first into a marriage fueled by the optimism that comes with finding "the one." But in a city where professional and personal passions collide and only the strongest relationships survive, navigating the waters of love and matrimony can sometimes prove too much. Funny, honest and intimate, The Last Five Years manipulates narrative and perspective to take a bold look at one young couple's hope that love endures the test of time.

Arcadia

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is set in April 1809 in a stately home in Derbyshire. Thomasina, a gifted pupil, proposes a startling theory, beyond her comprehension. All around her, the adults, including her tutor Septimus, are preoccupied with secret desires, illicit passions and professional rivalries. Two hundred years later, academic adversaries Hannah and Bernard are piecing together puzzling clues, curiously recalling those events of 1809, in their quest for an increasingly elusive truth.

Bright Star

Inspired by an astonishing true event, the wholly original musical Bright Star tells a sweeping tale of love and redemption set against the rich backdrop of the American South in the 1920s and 40s. When successful literary editor Alice Murphy meets an ambitious young soldier just home from World War II, their connection inspires Alice to confront a shocking incident from her past. Together they discover a long-buried secret with the power to transform their lives.

Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day the Musical centers on Phil Connors, a disgruntled big-city weatherman mysteriously stuck in small-town America reliving the same day over and over and over again-with no consequences, no regrets, no tomorrows, and no hangovers. But once he starts getting to know associate TV producer Rita Hanson, he discovers it's a day of second, third and fourth chances.

Clybourne Park

C;ybourne Park imagines the history of one of the more important houses in literary history, both before and after it becomes a focal point in Lorraine Hansberry's classic "A Raisin in the Sun." In 1959, the house, which is located in a white neighborhood at 406 Clybourne St. in Chicago, is sold to an African-American family. Then in 2009 after the neighborhood has changed into an African-American community, the house is sold to a white couple. It is through this prism of property ownership that Norris' lacerating sense of humor dissects race relations and middle class hypocrisies in America.

Fun Home

Fun Home is the groundbreaking musical based on Alison Bechdel's best-selling graphic memoir. Fun Home introduces us to Alison at three different ages, revealing memories of her uniquely dysfunctional family - her mother, brothers and volatile, brilliant, enigmatic father - that connect with her in surprising new ways. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Fun Home is a musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.

Sunday in the Park with George

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's masterpiece follows painter Georges Seurat in the months leading up to the completion of his most famous painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Consumed by his need to "finish the hat," Seurat alienates the French bourgeoisie, spurns his fellow artists, and neglects his lover Dot, not realizing that his actions will reverberate over the next 100 years.

Betrayal

Betrayal, one of Harold Pinter's masterworks, won the 1979 Olivier Award for Best New Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play (Foreign). In the play, Emma is married to Robert, a publisher, but she has long had an affair with Jerry, a literary agent and Robert's best friend; as, in a brilliant device, time is regained, so the full complexity of their relationships comes to light.

Follies

1971, New York. There's a party on the stage of the Weissman Theatre. Tomorrow the iconic building will be demolished. Thirty years after their final performance, the Follies girls gather to have a few drinks, sing a few songs and rehash the time worn bonds and betrayals which have inextricably linked them for decades.