Napa's Valley Players will present “An Evening of Shorts” next Sunday, Aug. 9, at 4 PM, featuring four original short plays performed back to back at the Napa Valley Education Foundation Discovery Campus. The lineup ranges from a futuristic office comedy to a dramatized standoff between Marie Curie and a psychic who had bewitched her husband, all staged under the direction of one woman handling every piece on the bill.
According to The Napa Valley Register, the evening opens with “Madam Director” by Gary A. Davis, a play set 30 years in the future that follows a character named Jordan and her husband, Rory. Debbie Gargalikis Baumann directs all four plays in the program, which also includes “Date Night” by Barbara A. Silverstone, featuring characters Lise and Tomas. The show runs at the Discovery Campus, located at 530 Third St. in Napa, a riverside facility that was gifted to the Napa Valley Education Foundation after the private nonprofit Oxbow School closed, according to the Napa Valley Education Foundation. NVEF now uses the campus as a community learning hub serving more than 10,000 Napa County youth annually.
A Historical Duel Takes Center Stage
The evening's centerpiece may be “Table in the Air,” a 10-minute historical play by Rex McGregor set in Paris in 1905. Per the Register's reporting, the piece features Marie Curie, her husband, and an Italian psychic. McGregor's own account of the work, posted on his website, fills in the premise further: the play imagines a 37-year-old Curie attempting to expose Italian psychic Eusapia Palladino, who had reportedly enticed Curie's husband Pierre during séances in Paris that year, according to Rex McGregor. McGregor is described as an award-winning New Zealand playwright whose work has been performed internationally.
Silverstone, whose “Date Night” appears earlier in the program, brings her own international credentials to the bill. She is a Sorbonne English professor and Paris-based translator, and her play “Mother, I Could Kill You” had already opened Valley Players' 2026 summer series after taking third place in the 2025 Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Playwriting Competition, according to the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild. Silverstone authored two of the ten original plays selected for the summer series.
Closing With a Personal Story
The program closes with “An Empowered Woman” by Barbara Anderson, an autobiographical short about her own life, per the Register. Anderson also writes books on long-distance walking, including a work titled “Letters from the Way,” and writes across fiction and non-fiction more broadly, according to Valley Players' own biography of the playwright. The full cast for the evening includes Ginna Beharry, Luis Carbajal, Lizeth Flores, Courtney Harris, Lu Kenmonth, Glen Mitchell, Cata Parkhurst, Bryan Pro, Patte Quinn, Megan E. Rogers, Randi Storm, Ashley Terradista, and Hartli Young.
Sunday's performance is the fifth installment in Valley Players' biweekly, six-part 2026 Summer Staged Reading Series, which runs from June 14 through Aug. 23 and includes an audience talk-back after every show, according to Visit Napa Valley. The staged-reading format gives audiences a direct hand in new play development, letting them respond to works still taking shape.
Ticket Prices and a Mission Rooted in Local Theater's Gaps
Advance tickets cost $12 and are available by phone at 707-948-6273 or online at valley-players.com, per the Register's reporting. Tickets at the door cost $15 and become available 30 minutes before showtime. Earlier this year, Valley Players also offered a $48 Summer Series Pass covering all six reading sessions, which lowers the effective admission to $8 per show compared with the door rate, according to Valley Players. Pass buyers are permitted to share admissions with friends.
The summer series receives funding in part through the Arts Council Napa Valley's Community Fund Grants, which provide local artists and small arts nonprofits with project awards ranging between $1,000 and $4,000, according to the Arts Council Napa Valley. Grant evaluations for the program emphasize community outreach and accessibility.
Valley Players was established in 2016 and incorporated as a nonprofit in 2017 with a mission to empower women over 40 by creating prominent roles and creative opportunities for them on and off stage, a response to a lack of mature female roles in local theater, according to Napa Valley Features. The company was co-founded by June Alane Reif and Debbie Gargalikis Baumann following the closures of several long-standing local theater groups, including the Napa Valley Playhouse and Dream Weavers, the latter of which had operated in Napa for nearly 30 years before shutting down. Since then, Valley Players has been voted Best Theater Troupe in Napa County by the North Bay Bohemian for three consecutive years, in 2024, 2025, and 2026.
