Arena Stage in Washington, DC has filled the last three slots of its 2026/27 season with Mexodus, Bad Dates: End Game and the East Coast premiere of Brokeback Mountain. Mix & Match packages go on sale November 4, and single tickets go on public sale November 17.
All three play the Kreeger Theater. For now, tickets for them, and for the previously announced Prima Facie and Purpose, are open only to Arena subscribers and group sales. The same announcement confirms that NIKOLA – A New Musical, previously listed for the season, will no longer run.
Mexodus: January 29–March 7, 2027
Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson's two-performer hip-hop musical follows a freedom seeker and an unlikely ally on the route that took thousands of enslaved people south across the Rio Grande to Mexico. The score is built live each night from looped instruments. The show premiered in 2024 as a co-production of DC's Mosaic Theater Company and Baltimore Center Stage, then played Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre in 2025 and the Daryl Roth Theatre in 2026, collecting Lortel, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards along the way. Arena presents it in partnership with Mosaic.
David Mendizábal directs and designs the costumes, and Tony Thomas choreographs. The original designers return: Riw Rakkulchon (set), Mextly Couzin (lighting) and Tony winner Mikhail Fiksel (sound). Casting has not been announced.
Bad Dates: End Game: April 23–June 6, 2027
Theresa Rebeck's follow-up to her 2003 comedy Bad Dates brings back the original team: Rebeck as writer, Tony winner John Benjamin Hickey as director and Tony winner Julie White as Haley. Haley is now 58 and three years widowed, and back on the dating scene by way of apps and setups. The DC premiere follows early-2027 runs at Hartford Stage and George Street Playhouse, Arena's partners on the production. The full creative team is still to be named.
Brokeback Mountain: July 9–August 29, 2027
Ashley Robinson's play, adapted from Annie Proulx's short story with songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, closes the season. It traces Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist from a summer spent herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain in 1963 through two decades of a love neither can live openly, with country-and-western songs carrying what the two men leave unsaid. The piece has already played London's @sohoplace and Chicago Shakespeare Theater; Arena stages it by special arrangement with Nica Burns and Adam Blanshay. Cast and creative team will be announced later.
The rest of the season
Executive Producer Edgar Dobie likened the season to "re-fueling in mid-flight," after what he called "a dramatic shift in season planning." Already on the calendar: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, Anna D. Shapiro's revival of Eric Bentley's docudrama, in the Kreeger through December 6; Step Afrika!'s Magical Musical Holiday Step Show in the Fichandler Stage, December 4–23; the U.S. regional premiere of Suzie Miller's Prima Facie in the Kogod Cradle, January 8–March 7, 2027; and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Purpose, staged in the round for the first time in the Fichandler, March 12–May 2, 2027.
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