A play born from a real 1951 UFO mystery over Lubbock is about to fill San Antonio's Tobin Center with nine distinct West Texas voices, live on stage together for the first time. I Saw the Lights, written by and starring Greater Tuna co-creator Jaston Williams, opens Wednesday, September 16, and runs through September 27 in the Tobin Center's Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater.
The production marks a major transformation for the piece. As reported by the San Antonio Current, the play is directed by Chris McGarry and features local thespians performing alongside Williams. That's a significant departure from its 2021 debut, when Williams originally premiered I Saw the Lights as a streamed solo show, playing all nine characters himself during pandemic-era theater shutdowns, according to Broadway World. The September 2026 Tobin Center staging reimagines the work as a full, multi-character ensemble play.
Joining Williams onstage are San Antonio stage veterans Kathy Couser, Linda Ford, Michael Howard, Karen Jones, Cynthia Martinez Rodriguez, David Stahl, Will Mercer, and Vincent Hardy, per Broadway World's rundown of the production. The ensemble format gives each of the play's nine distinct personalities its own voice, rather than funneling all of them through a single performer as in the original virtual version.
A Real Texas Sky Mystery Inspires the Story
The play draws its premise from the real-life Lubbock Lights, one of Texas's most famous unexplained aerial phenomena. The incident began in August 1951 when a group of Texas Tech College professors sitting outdoors observed 20 to 30 glowing, star-like objects moving silently across the night sky in formation, according to a historical account documented on Wikipedia. Texas Tech freshman Carl Hart Jr. captured a now-famous series of photographs showing a V-shaped formation of lights during the sightings, images that were later published in Life magazine and investigated by the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, as detailed in a report on Medium.
Per the San Antonio Current's reporting on the production, I Saw the Lights explores how people interpret singular events according to individual beliefs, predispositions and personal recollections. It's a theme that maps directly onto the real Lubbock case, in which dozens of residents reported their own versions of what they saw over several weeks, according to the dossier's historical background.
Williams has personal roots in that same West Texas landscape. He grew up in the Texas Panhandle and attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock, giving him direct familiarity with the setting and culture the play depicts, according to the San Antonio Sentinel. Williams is also the co-creator, co-writer and longtime star of Greater Tuna and its sequels, the long-running satirical comedy franchise he helped launch in 1981; he later received the Texas Medal of Arts in 2013 in recognition of his contributions to Texas theater, per the Texas Almanac.
An Intimate Black-Box Setting With a Communal Twist
The production is being staged in the Tobin Center's Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater, a flexible black-box venue with seating for up to 300 patrons. That intimate scale suits the character-driven material, giving audiences a close-up view of the ensemble's competing recollections of that single strange night.
Every performance will also include a pre-show happy hour in the Tobin Center lobby, an addition meant to foster connection between artists and audience members before the curtain rises, according to Broadway World's coverage of the season. Tickets for I Saw the Lights range from $24.50 to $47.50, and the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, located at 100 Auditorium Circle, can be reached at 210-223-8624.
Part of a Season Built Around Memory and Storytelling
I Saw the Lights serves as the mainstage opener for the 2026-2027 season from 100A Productions, the Tobin Center's in-house theater company, structured around the theme Listening, Memory, and the Stories We Tell alongside other productions including Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime and Steve Martin's The Underpants, Broadway World reports. 100A Productions was launched by the Tobin Center during the COVID-19 pandemic specifically to employ local artists, and its name nods both to the center's address at 100 Auditorium Circle and to the 100-amp electrical circuits standard in theatrical production, according to background provided by the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.
That origin story matters for how I Saw the Lights arrives on stage this month. A show that began as a solitary, pandemic-necessity performance by one actor has grown into a full ensemble piece employing eight additional local performers, transforming a virtual experiment into a community-built production rooted in one of Texas's strangest and most enduring folk mysteries.
