Press Release: Fremont Ave.

SOUTH COAST REPERTORY TO CO-PRODUCE WORLD PREMIERE OF FREMONT AVE. BY REGGIE D. WHITE WITH ARENA STAGE

New Play By Multi-Hyphenate Star Will Be Part of 2025/26 Season

COSTA MESA, Calif. (Apr. 14, 2025)—South Coast Repertory (Artistic Director David Ivers and Managing Director Suzanne Appel) announced two of the country’s most prestigious regional theatres are coming to together to produce the world premiere of Fremont Ave. by Reggie D. White. A Co-production with Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Fremont Ave. will run at SCR April 25-May 23, 2026 on the Segerstrom Stage, following its Washington, D.C. run.

The rest of the 2025-26 season will be announced in May.

Fremont Ave. was a featured reading at the 2024 Pacific Playwrights Festival, where audiences expressed a strong connection to its vibrant humanity and richly layered story. It was further developed during a summer residency at Berkeley Repertory. The play had its first reading at Vineyard Theatre in January 2023.

In 1968, George buys a suburban Southern California home—a stop on his way to something bigger. In 1991, Robert is still living there, itching to start his own life. Thirty years later, Joseph returns home, still struggling with a secret that holds him back. With humor and heart, this multigenerational drama revolves around three Black men, their journeys to choose love and the woman who holds them all together.

An emerging playwriting star, White said the semi-biographical story was inspired by two relatives—the character Robert is based on his uncle and Audrey is based on his real grandmother, also named Audrey. He said he was pushed to write the play by two friends and fellow artists—actor/director/playwright Colman Domingo (“Fear the Walking Dead,” Fat Ham, Sing Sing) and playwright Lauren Gunderson (Emile and Silent Sky, both at SCR).

“Reggie D. White’s Fremont Ave. may be a world premiere, but it is destined to become a future classic,” Ivers said. “It is among the best plays I have read in the last several years—beautiful, unflinching, intimate and expansive. Reggie’s portrayal of a multi-generational family is, without exception, a huge contribution to the canon of new plays nurtured and supported by SCR. We are thrilled to be partnering with him and Arena Stage, one of the country’s most important theatres.”

Currently the Senior Director for Artistic Impact and Strategy at Arena Stage, the New York-based White is an award-winning, multi-hyphenate artist, educator and arts advocate. His works include Lessons in Survival: 1971, which he co-conceived with Tyler Thomas, Peter Mark Kendal and Marin Ireland based on the iconic television conversation on the British television show, “Soul!,” between poet Nikki Giovanni and famed author James Baldwin that catapulted Giovanni’s career. That play was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick Off-Broadway at Vineyard Theatre. His In Case You Haven’t Heard premiered at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, New York in 2021.

He made his Broadway acting debut in Matthew Lopez’s Tony Award-winning The Inheritance and has appeared at 59E59, La Jolla Playhouse, New York Theatre Workshop and American Repertory Theatre. His directing credits include Atlantic Theater Company, The Public Theater, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Bay Street Theater and PlayGround-SF among others.

White’s awards include the Colman Domingo Award, the TCG Fox Fellowship, the TBA Titan Award the RHE Artistic Fellowship and an NAACP Theatre Award nomination.

Location: South Coast Repertory is located at 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa, at the Bristol Street/Avenue of the Arts exit off the San Diego (405) Freeway in the David Emmes/Martin Benson Theatre Center, part of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Parking is available on Park Center Drive, off Anton Boulevard.

Complete information is available at www.scr.org.