“Being part of Shadowland is very much for me about being in a community that has a theater as part of its core,” Brendan Burke, the artistic director of Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, said. “I like that theater is a communal activity and is alive. Technology increasingly takes us away from each other. One of the few places where we can all sit together and launch something is the theater, and then you discover the commonality of each other.”

This season of Shadowland Stages will be a mix of plays and musicals, including a show that recently appeared off-Broadway and a new play about AI. The organization just held their general season auditions and cast the first show, The Reservoir. Shadowland Stages will be one of the first theaters in the county to perform the show following its New York premiere.

Burke described The Reservoir as “a hopeful play about recovery, specifically through a cross-generational connection.” It follows a young man who returns home to recover from alcohol addiction, bonding with his two sets of grandparents and finding parallels in their situations in the process. Burke said it is a “funny, thoughtful, important play.” And now, it has a “stellar cast.”

“The quality of the show is both comic and dramatic,” Burke said. “And so each character really requires a strong actor with strong dramatic chops, but who can have a sense of the pace of the comedy that the show needs.”

Burke will be directing two shows this season, a family-friendly retelling of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and the classic Neil Simon comedy Brighton Beach Memoirs. As Shadowland Stages moves through its first production and the summer, callbacks will begin for the next performance.

“Ultimately, you always look for authenticity, truthfulness, and you're looking for someone who can portray the truth of a moment in a character,” Burke said. “Then there's practical consideration that there's only really two weeks of rehearsal and a couple days of tech before a show goes up. So you're also looking for someone who can get excited by that challenge, because it's daunting to have to learn a whole show.”

Shadowland Stages will also stage two musicals Never Can Say Goodbye: The 70s Beehive Musical, which will feature six women performing music from the 1970s, touching on politics and women’s issues. The second musical, smaller in scale, is Lady Day, which Burke said is “more of a play with music” featuring Billie Holiday hits.

Ending the season is Flawless, which is about two writers using AI to try and create the next great American play. Burke said it was “an exciting, timely play for exactly all of us who are living in time of a major technological bridge, and the technology may be outpacing the discussion of ethics and practicality.”

The Reservoir will be performed May 28-June 14.