Fairhaven Summer Repertory Theatre Is Back for Its 9th Season

Who: Bellingham TheatreWorks

What: Fairhaven Summer Repertory Theatre

Where: Firehouse Arts and Events Center, 1314 Harris Ave, Bellingham, WA 98225

When: June 23 - July 19, 2026

Six nights a week: Tuesday - Saturday @ 7:30, Sunday @ 5:00

Tickets: www.BellinghamTheatreWorks.org

Single Adult Tickets $25

Students (with ID) $20

Season Tickets ($60 for all three shows – Best Value!)

Call 360-389-2835 for information, ticketing and disability accommodation.

The American Family

Fairhaven Summer Repertory Theatre is back for its 9th season, producing three award winning and thought-provoking plays that put the modern American family under a microscope.

Audience members will experience the intimacy of being in the round at the Firehouse Arts and Events Center, sitting with the actors while they share three iconic plays that are at once tense, dramatic, hilarious at times and disturbing at others. The plays reveal how families respond to extreme events and pressures, drawing closer together while confronting events that easily connect to our own lives.

Our company combines many members of the community: students and educators, parents and children, as well as guest artists from far beyond Bellingham Bay, all working together to bring these three plays to life.

Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon, Directed by Mark Kuntz

A comic memoir told through the eyes of 15-year-old Eugene, exploring the life of a struggling Jewish family in 1937. This semi-autobiographical play was written by Neil Simon who began writing his memoirs when he was 15! In typical Simon comic fashion, Eugene dreams about baseball and girls while learning about family, relationships, and an impending war.

Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury, Directed by Charles

This 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning comedy follows a middle class African American family as they prepare for a birthday dinner for their grandmother, an event watched by four white people. The mother wants the party to be perfect, her sister can’t be bothered, the father doesn’t seem to listen, her brother is missing, her daughter is a teenager! The first act hilarity quicky turns into a gripping examination of family and white supremacy.

Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Directed by Kayla Adams

Every estranged member of the Lafayette clan has descended upon the crumbling Arkansas homestead to settle the accounts of the newly dead patriarch. As the three adult children sort through a lifetime of their father’s hoarded mementos and junk, they collide over clutter, debt and a disturbing discovery hiding among their father’s possessions. This 2024 Tony Award winning play uses biting humor to explore a bruising family gathering.

All plays run in repertory beginning June 23 and will continue 6 nights a week for 4 weeks. Our schedule allows audience members to see three plays in three nights resulting in a robust weekend of theatre, or to find dates throughout the run that match a complex schedule.

Mark Kuntz, Producing Director of Bellingham TheatreWorks said of the trio of shows: “We’re doing some really exciting plays this year, and exploring the theme in different ways. Each of the shows showcases an American family, and in each case we’re seeing two or three generations represented, children and parents and aunts and uncles. In a few cases we’ve been able to cast actors who are related to each other; a parent and a child, or siblings. We have some phenomenal theatre families in the area and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to put some of those folks together on stage.”

BTW is known for jaw-dropping sets and lighting that enhances productions. There’s an added puzzle to be solved with FSRT, where the set is ‘struck’ or dismantled every night after the show and reset every afternoon, so that the space at Firehouse Art Center can be used during the day for regular programming. In addition, the trio of plays are all presented ‘in the round,’ with seats on all four sides of the stage. This presents additional challenges to the set designer, putting the focus on furniture and small set pieces that enhance the play without getting in the way of sightlines. Less is more for sets in the round.

The entire season schedule with ticketing and attendance information, as well as complete descriptions of the plays and information about all of the artists, can be found at www.BellinghamTheatreWorks.org