The Maryland Stage Company

The Maryland Stage Company is the resident professional theatre company of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Founded in 1987 by its Artistic Director Xerxes Mehta, the Maryland Stage Company has received consistent national acclaim for its innovative and challenging productions. The company acts as a magnet for performers, actors, choreographers, composers, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers from throughout the Baltimore-Washington area. Since 1997, the Maryland Stage Company has performed during the summer at Center Stage in Baltimore.

Recent productions have included John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1999); Chekhov's The Sea Gull (1998); Molière's Tartuffe (1997); John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1995); Molière's The Misanthrope (1994); Harold Pinter's Old Times, presented at the Baltimore Theatre Project in 1994; King Lear (1993); Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1992); A Tribute to Samuel Beckett in 1990, which included his plays Not I, Ohio Impromptu, and Rockaby; and the Beckett trio Not I, That Time, and Ohio Impromptu (1996) that was performed at the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Strasbourg, France.

In aesthetic terms, the Maryland Stage Company is designed to serve as a laboratory for theatre as a discipline, in which great works from the past and the present can be re-evaluated and revitalized through uncompromised stagings in noncommercial production circumstances. Employing a European model, the Company subjects each of its projects to a prolonged period of research and rehearsal, in the expectation that such an approach will generate fresher, deeper and more radical imaginings than the more restricted circumstances of commercial theatre usually permit.

The Maryland Stage Company is funded in part by grants from UMBC, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, the Baltimore County Executive, the Baltimore County Council, the Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences, and by gifts from foundations, corporations and individuals.

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