After more than a decade, Emily Bohannon, a graduate of the Juilliard Playwrights Program, finally got to see her play, The Fiancé, produced for the first time in Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre. The world premiere capped Riverside’s 2025-2026 season with a run of performances led by two of the theaters founders, Jody Hovland and Ron Clark. LV sat down with the playwright and screenwriter “dedicated to finding the deep humanity in complicated people.”
Riverside Theatre
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Review: Three generations of women lead with heart and humor in ‘The Fiancé’ at Riverside Theatre
On the opening night — and the world premiere — of The Fiancé at Riverside Theatre in Iowa City, among the first things I noted was how the playwright, Emily Bohannon, describes her body of work…
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Review: Private school parents clash over uncomfortably familiar issues in ‘Eureka Day’ at Riverside Theatre
Jonathan Spector’s 2025 Tony Award-winning Eureka Day, with its sharp humor and painfully familiar questions about privilege, progressivism and public health, has found a lively and incisive staging in Iowa City. Under the direction of Kathleen Johnson, Riverside Theatre’s production embraces the play’s contradictions with a mix of warmth and unease — a balance that, […]
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Iowa theater companies aren’t afraid to unsettle as they hold a mirror up to our times
Let’s start this survey of Iowa’s local theater landscape with a bit of a dramatic flourish: The start of the COVID-19 pandemic was half a decade ago. Apologies if that messes with your tethering to time, but I bring it up for a reason. When looking at the last five years of local theater output, […]
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Aaron Pang isn’t brave. But he’s currently sharing stories from his sex life at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.
Only a day removed from a red-eye journey from Iowa City to Edinburgh, Scotland, Aaron Pang, as he puts it, is a sleepy baby. Pang and crew did that thing you try to do when traveling; power-through a night-turned-day sans sleep, hoping that your circadian rhythm can catch-up to the change in time zones. But “the time difference is a bitch,” Pang shares.
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Review: Riverside serves ‘Romeo & Juliet’ straight up for their 40th Free Summer Shakespeare show
The mini Globe Theatre in Iowa City’s Lower City Park reopened grander than ever on Friday, July 13 for the premiere of Riverside’s 40th Free Shakespeare show and 25th season on the festival stage.
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Review: A fence between neighbors sparks polite, passive aggressive chaos in Riverside’s timely ‘Native Gardens’
Native Gardens opens to the strains of “Las Casitas del Barrio Alto” by Victor Jara. Keen-eared listeners will recognize the melody of Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” and while the Spanish iteration was written to critique socioeconomic disparities in Chile, it contains the same critique of upper middle class posturing as it’s sister song.
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Review: Riverside ensures you’ll never see the ‘The Illiad’ the same way again with ‘The Cure at Troy,’ a tale of snakes and scruples
Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre is entering the final week of performances for their run of The Cure at Troy, a play featuring a lesser-known character detailed in Homer’s Iliad.
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Review: Riverside Theatre’s ‘POTUS’ is a smart, chaotic, wig-tastic political farce starring seven women
Closing out the political chapter of Riverside Theatre’s 2024-2025 season, following Derrick Wang’s opera Scala/Ginsburg, is Oregonian playwright Selina Fillinger’s POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive. A fast-paced political farce set in the White House, the play follows seven women working behind the scenes to manage a […]
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‘Twelfth Night'(s): Two Iowa companies stage Shakespeare’s gender-bending rom-com as First Folio turns 400
It’s been 400 years since William Shakespeare’s First Folio was published. Released in 1623, the First Folio collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays under the title Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Because of this collection, upward of a dozen plays that may have been lost to history were able to live on, including Twelfth […]
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Set and staged in Iowa City, Riverside’s two-woman play ‘The Roommate’ explores the desire to burn it all down and start over
Though the play takes place in Iowa City, and was written by an alumnus of the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop, this marks the first time The Roommate has been staged in Iowa City, according to Adam Knight. “I knew the story [before moving here], I knew it took place in this quiet, Midwestern town, […]
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Theater Review: ‘The Roommate’ at Riverside Theatre
The Roommate was penned by one of the most produced playwrights in the country right now, Jen Silverman, who received an MFA in playwriting at the University of Iowa. The show takes place in Iowa City and, for the first time now, is being staged here Though Silverman’s lived all over the world, Iowa must […]
