In October, you could walk a few blocks through downtown Salt Lake City and encounter a woman accused of witchcraft, a closeted Mormon man’s grieving parents, a telekinetic teenager covered in blood and a family watching the Great Salt Lake disappear.

Salt Lake’s stages are having a dark autumn.

There are devils and suicides, bullying and environmental collapse, dead fathers and grieving parents.

The contemporary reworking of The Witch of Edmonton follows a devil bargaining for souls in an English village.

Witch

In Jen Silverman’s Witch, presented by Pygmalion Productions at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center’s Leona Wagner Black Box and directed by Morag Shepherd, the devil arrives in Edmonton looking for souls and finds plenty of prospects in the small English village. Silverman’s play is a contemporary reworking of the 1621 Jacobean drama The Witch of Edmonton, but its bargain is familiar enough: tell the devil what you want and name your price.

Elizabeth should be an easy mark. The village has already labeled her a witch and cast her out. She has little reason to feel loyalty toward the people who despise her and even less reason to believe the world is arranged justly. Yet her soul proves surprisingly difficult to buy.

The devil has better luck elsewhere. The respectable people surrounding this dangerous outcast, victims of their individual ambitions, resentments and desires, are easy prey. Cuddy, a landowner’s son, and Frank, his penniless rival for the father’s favor, imagine wealth and status as the things they ought to want even as each harbors other desires he can barely articulate. They don’t really need a devil. Just some permission.

Carrie: The Musical

A couple of blocks away, at MadKing Productions’ Fellowship Theater in the Gateway, another young woman has been designated an outsider.

Carrie White has been with us for more than half a century. Stephen King introduced the bullied Maine teenager in his 1974 debut novel, and Brian De Palma’s 1976 film gave popular culture some of its most enduring horror imagery: the prom dress, the bucket, the blood.

First presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988, Carrie: The Musical transferred to Broadway and promptly became one of musical theater’s legendary flops, closing after 16 previews and five performances. But bootleg recordings circulated among theater fans, helping turn the failure into a cult object. Its creators eventually returned to it, substantially revising the script and songs for a smaller 2012 off-Broadway production.

That resurrected Carrie is the one MadKing Productions is staging under director Chad Henwood. Henwood is less interested in the famous bucket of blood than in everything that gets Carrie underneath it. “Beneath the supernatural spectacle is an intensely human story about isolation, shame, cruelty and the need to belong,” he says. His production focuses on Carrie and her classmates as “imperfect, impulsive teenagers.”

Facing East

Andrew McCormick is dead. His Mormon parents, Ruth and Alex, are reeling from their son’s suicide when they encounter Marcus, his partner, for the first time.

Plan-B Theatre’s revival of Carol Lynn Pearson’s 70-minute play, in the Rose Wagner’s Studio Theatre, is dedicated to Pearson, who died earlier this year; philanthropist and LGBTQ advocate Bruce Bastian, who died in 2024; and Charles Lynn Frost, who created the role of Alex and died in 2021.

Jay Perry, who originated the role of Marcus, the lover, returns for this revival as Alex, the father, a bit of metatheatrical casting that puts the play’s own passage of time onstage. The young man who once confronted Andrew’s parents with the part of their son’s life they did not know has, 20 years later, become the father doing the confronting.

When Pearson wrote Facing East, the collision between Mormon family life and a gay son’s identity was painfully contemporary. And remains so: Plan-B’s entire run, including added performances, sold out before opening.

Very Like a Whale

At Salt Lake Acting Company, death brings another family home.

In Troy Deutsch’s Very Like a Whale, the eccentric Sharp family reunites to sell their late father’s lakeside house. Inside are whales, a busty mermaid portrait and, at some point, a dance for the seagulls. Outside the window is another disappearing presence: the Great Salt Lake.

Deutsch’s play, directed by Alexandra Harbold, is a co-world premiere with Cadence Theatre Company in Richmond, Virginia, produced at SLAC in collaboration with Flying Bobcat Theatrical Laboratory. It also reunites Deutsch, Flying Bobcat co-founder Robert Scott Smith and SLAC a decade after their collaboration on Climbing With Tigers.

The seed for the new play was an 1890 newspaper article Smith brought to Deutsch. From that bit of Great Salt Lake lore, Deutsch has built what SLAC describes as a farcical comedy about grief, lineage and a planet in crisis. “As the world gets crazier and reality feels less and less recognizable, my writing seems to get more and more absurd,” Deutsch says.

The Sharps have gathered to deal with what their father left behind. Families inherit stories and grievances, habits and obligations. And the lake outside the window belongs to another kind of inheritance—something received from the past whose condition will be passed along to somebody else.

ON STAGE

Witch
By Jen Silverman
Pygmalion Productions
Leona Wagner Black Box, Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. 300 South, Salt Lake City
Through Oct. 17, 2026 Pygmalion Productions
Pygmalion Productions

Carrie: The Musical
Book by Lawrence D. Cohen, music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford; based on the novel by Stephen King
MadKing Productions
Fellowship Theater at The Gateway, 167 S. Rio Grande St., Salt Lake City
Oct. 15–25, 2026
Evening performances at 7 p.m.; Sunday matinees at 3 p.m.
MadKing Productions

Facing East
By Carol Lynn Pearson
Plan-B Theatre
Studio Theatre, Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. 300 South, Salt Lake City
Oct. 22–Nov. 8, 2026 Plan-B Theatre
Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m.; Saturdays at 4 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m.
Run is sold out; waitlist available.
Plan-B Theatre

Very Like a Whale
By Troy Deutsch
Salt Lake Acting Company, in collaboration with Flying Bobcat Theatrical Laboratory
Upstairs Theatre, Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North, Salt Lake City
Through Oct. 25, 2026 saltlakeactingcompany.org
Salt Lake Acting Company

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UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.