GUILFORD-Guilford Center Stage (GCS) enters its second decade with the traditional spring and fall productions at Broad Brook Community Center.
The 2026 season opens the first weekend in May with “Shorts,” a program of small plays. The stage manager will be Sue Kelly. Several works by regional playwrights are already in the lineup, and the group welcomes script submissions until Jan. 23.
Plays of 8 to 10 pages are ideal, and a maximum of 12 minutes running time is suggested. Playwrights may submit PDFs or Word documents to producer Don McLean at don.inscape@gmail.com or use the address below to arrange to deliver a hard copy.
Open auditions for actors for “Shorts” will be held in two sessions: Thursday, Feb. 5, from 5 to 7 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 7, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. No appointment is needed. Auditioners may come unprepared, or have a short monologue ready, and scenes from the short plays will be available for an impromptu reading.
Auditions take place in the fully accessible upstairs theater room of the Broad Brook Community Center at 3940 Guilford Center Rd., about 4 miles west of the Country Store.
GCS also welcomes interested theater tech people, who either have, or want to learn, stage lighting and sound skills. Those interested may contact the group at don.inscape@gmail.com or show up at the auditions.
The season concludes on the first weekend in October. Guilford playwright Michael Nethercott returns to GCS with a new full-length play that blends the human experience with the history of a particular small town: Guilford, Vermont.
Auditions for this play will be Thursday, July 30, from 6 to 8 p.m., and Saturday Aug. 1, from 2 to 4 p.m.
The 2026 productions are GCS’s 16th and 17th, since its founding as the resident theater company at the BBCC in 2015. The group has made a mission of presenting the work of local and regional playwrights.
Work by authors living elsewhere in Vermont have included plays by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Sinclair Lewis.
In 2016, GCS presented A Battle of Wits (1916), written by Guilford native Charles W. Henry, who had also designed and painted the scenic curtains and flats in 1900 for the stage at the Community Center.
Current Guilford playwright Verandah Porche has also been featured. This past fall, Vermont playwright-director Miles Ledoux brought a pair of Agatha Christie mysteries to the stage.
The theater group has brought the occasional venture into the mainstream, as well, with shows such as last year’s Love Letters and the 2023 production of Wilder’s Our Town.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.