As A Short Leap Theatre Company has grown, so has our understanding of what community actually requires. Identity may be the starting point, but it is not the end of the conversation. Once we know who we are, we are confronted with what comes next: how we show up, how we listen, how we care for one another, and how we keep going when the world makes it difficult to do even that.

Sometimes, the work begins with something simpler:
to pause.
to stay.
to breathe.

In assembling our 2026–2027 mainstage season, these plays rose to the forefront for the ways they hold us in moments of constraint—when language falters, when bodies resist, when distance grows, and when connection is no longer easy or assured. Each asks what it means to remain present in the face of pressure. Together, they return us to a familiar A Short Leap question, just quieter, sharper, and harder to ignore:

Who are we when we have to fight to stay connected?

In Good Day, a world premiere by Diana Lynn Small, we are dropped into a single afternoon where movement, grief, and anger collide. Anna lies immobile on her parents’ front lawn, refusing to move, to eat, or to comply. What unfolds is a raw, funny, and ferocious reckoning with avoidance, care, and emotional labor. Good Day asks: What happens when stopping fully and stubbornly is the only way forward?

In Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, an unlikely relationship forms between a young man reeling from loss and the grandmother who takes him in. Through quiet humor and profound tenderness, Herzog’s play examines generational gaps, political divides, and the fragile ways we show up for one another. It asks: What does it mean to stay; to listen, to soften, to make space for another person’s breath?

Finally, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner offers a quietly radical vision of intimacy in a world shaped by restriction. As a couple navigates a government-imposed limit on spoken words, Steiner’s play explores how connection adapts when language itself becomes scarce. Tender, playful, and devastating, it asks: What do we hold onto when every word must be chosen? And what can still be said without speaking at all?

Together, these three plays reflect A Short Leap’s continued commitment to work that is intimate, challenging, and rooted in lived experience. They ask us to resist urgency, to sit inside discomfort, and to practice care not as an idea, but as an action.

If last season asked us to look inward, this season asks something different of us:

to slow down.

to reach for one another.

to stay—

and, when we can…

To Breathe