UVA Drama to Open 25-26 Season with CONTINUITY, by Bess Wohl
Hollywood Meets Climate Change in Wohl’s Film-Within-a-Play, Bringing Satire, Spectacle, and the Environment into Focus on the Helms Stage
Continuity, directed by Doug Grissom
Opens October 30th, 2025, in the Helms Theatre
Click here for tickets!
UVA Department of Drama’s inaugural production of the 2025-2026 season, Continuity, by Bess Wohl, invites audiences to step onto a Hollywood film set like no other. Wohl’s sharp, funny play takes audiences behind (and beyond) the camera in a hilarious and thought-provoking satire about art, ego, and environmental apocalypse.
A script that feels both fresh and relevant, Continuity is a witty satire of Hollywood’s best intentions and biggest contradictions. The story unfolds on a high-budget movie set where a cast and crew are filming a blockbuster about climate change — complete with fake icebergs, big egos, and a creeping awareness that the production’s spectacle may be undermining its message.
Beneath the satire lies a deeper question: Can making art about saving the world actually help to save it? As one character observes, the people most likely to see a movie about environmental crisis are also the least likely to change their behavior afterward—an uncomfortable truth in juxtaposition with the world in which it is spoken. “The movie they’re making is about the destruction of our natural world,” says Director Doug Grissom, “but it’s Hollywood’s glossy version of a climate catastrophe, and it feels funny and absurd and tragically sad all at once.”
For UVA Drama’s student cast, Continuity offers a rare chance to further explore that tension between truth and make-believe. Actors navigate dual roles—playing both the actors making the movie and the characters within it—while the design team brings two overlapping worlds to life: the “fake” film set and the “real” behind-the-scenes chaos.
The interplay between illusion and authenticity extends to the show’s production design. Lighting Designer Will Conrad, a third-year student majoring in electrical engineering with a drama minor, embraced the challenge of capturing the shifting emotional and visual tones of a movie set and the life of the players off-camera, all existing within a theatre.
“The way the show is laid out in [film] takes is very interesting,” Conrad says. “Looking at a script and a design from a lighting perspective, I’m usually thinking in terms of warm vs. cool, and this script leans dramatically into that. It’s actually very important to have meaningful shifts from one to the other, so that’s a space I’m enjoying exploring through design, research, and gathering palettes.”
For Conrad, designing a mainstage show has been a long-held dream. “Before I even started my first year, I got to meet with Lee Kennedy, who walked me through the design for Virginia Theatre Festival’s production of Cabaret. When I saw the show that evening — I was just blown away. I knew I wanted to design a mainstage production here and it’s exciting to step into those shoes now.”
Sound Designer Oliver Helzer, a third-year student double-majoring in psychology and drama, plays an equally crucial role in shaping Continuity’s layered world — one that extends well beyond what audiences can see. “It was a difficult play to analyze for sound initially, and hearing the actors read through it really helped it click,” Helzer notes. “We’re creating an entire ‘off-camera’ soundscape—voices, ambient action, the hum of a working film set. It helps make the fake feel real, and the real feel… a little bit fake.”
Helzer’s design uses recorded voices and ambient effects to define the crew bustling just beyond view. “We want to give a real sense of a film set,” Grissom adds. “There’s action going on off-camera that affects and is affected by what happens in the scene. Sound is a big component of creating this larger world we can’t see.”
“The characters are very alive,” Grissom says. “On the surface, we may see them as satirical Hollywood archetypes, but through the story we see their deeper sides — their bigger struggles, hopes, and challenges. The ensemble nature of the play gives our students a chance to explore what it really takes to work together when the stakes are high and human flaws are only natural.”
Ultimately, Continuity is about persistence — artistic, environmental, and human. “As we think about the term ‘continuity,’” Grissom reflects, “there’s also this theme of pushing forward even when it might feel too late to achieve the outcome you want. That’s true for the film, for the characters, and for the world we live in.”
Performances of Continuity run October 30 – November 1 & November 5 – 8 in the Helms Theatre, UVA Drama Building. Tickets are sold through the UVA Arts Box Office and are available online at www.artsboxoffice.virginia.edu, by phone at 434-924-3376, or in person at the UVA Arts Box office located in the lobby of the Drama Building. Hours of operation are noon to 5PM, Tuesday through Friday. Free parking for UVA Drama performances is available at the Culbreth Road Parking Garage, conveniently located across from the Drama Building.
