Good Birth
by Patrick Earl
June 20, 2026
Thoresen Theater, Randolph College

The 2026 Playwright's Initiative World Premiere is Good Birth by Patrick Earl. This new work tells the story of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. This facility, right across the James River from Lynchburg, VA, is now called The Central Virginia Training Center. It became the center of the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell that upheld a physician’s right to forcibly sterilize a patient. Good Birth is a fictional tale of a young girl asked too soon to fight for her right to bear a child and suffer society’s misguided view of intelligence; all while facing down the brute force of the American Eugenics Movement in the early 1900s.

CONTENT TRANSPARENCY: Adult Language, Violence, Adult Themes, Discussion of Sexual Abuse, Racially Charged Language, And use of Historic Racial Terminology.

Mud Nostalgia 
by Mark Evans Bryan
Performed by Sue Ott Rowlands*

March 27-31, 2026

High in the Appalachian Mountains, a woman snake handler struggles to understand her life and her faith in the wake of an unexpected betrayal. Mud Nostalgia is one in a long history of solo works that Sue Ott Rowlands, President of Randolph College, has performed worldwide.

If you missed your chance to see it live, enjoy this subtitled archival recording of Mud Nostalgia!

*Appearing courtesy of Actors Equity Association