PURE Theatre is proud to announce the world premiere of Red Shirts by PURE Co-founder Rodney Lee Rogers, directed by PURE Co-founder and Artistic Director Sharon Graci. This bold multimedia production will run July 16 through August 1 at the Cannon Street Arts Center as PURE’s 2026 Preseason Summer Slam, offering audiences a dangerously funny and haunting prelude to the company’s 24th season.
From the co-founders of PURE Theatre, building on twenty-four years of uncompromising storytelling, comes a new Southern noir anthology for the stage. Red Shirts brings together three stories of men living at the edge of consequence: a stuntman who has spent his life taking hits meant for someone else, a musician still waiting for the end of the world, and a man in the Charleston marsh country who discovers that some debts are older than the people who owe them.
These are the Red Shirts. The expendables. The people nobody expects to survive the story. Until they do.
“Red Shirts is a different kind of PURE project for us,” says director Sharon Graci. “It has the intimacy and danger our audiences expect from PURE, and it allows us to push into a more stylized visual and sonic world. It is film, Southern Gothic storytelling, and live theatre performance all colliding in one room. I love that it feels a little unruly. I love that it feels very theatrical.”
“This guy—a kind of archetype, if you will—trapped in his own head, circling the same wreckage, has been in everything I've written for thirty years, since Steaming Milk in 1997. Red Shirts, the short stories, is the closest I've come to saying the whole thing at once. To have them come to life on stage is incredible," says Rodney Lee Rogers, the writer/playwright of Red Shirts.
Featuring David Mandel, Scott Pattison, and Robbie Thomas, Red Shirts is staged as a spare, heightened, multimedia event with live performance, projection, sound, and the raw immediacy of actors telling stories under pressure. The production leans into the atmosphere of noir, the strangeness of the Lowcountry, and the ache of men who have spent too long pretending they are fine.
“Rodney’s writing has always had this muscular, cinematic quality,” says Graci. “He writes men beautifully, but not sentimentally. These characters are funny, damaged, self-aware, evasive, and deeply human. They are standing inside stories that could destroy them, and somehow they keep talking.”
Red Shirts also marks the return of PURE’s Summer Slam, a preseason production designed to keep the company making work during the summer while giving audiences something outside the formal mainstage season. Though Red Shirts is not included in PURE Theatre’s Season 24 Flex Pass, Flex Pass holders receive discounted tickets.
To celebrate summer and the launch of this world premiere, PURE is offering a Happy Summer BOGO ticket discount from July 1 through July 15. The offer is valid for opening weekend performances only. Patrons may buy one ticket and receive one ticket free during the promotional window. Use the code: BOGO
Tickets for Red Shirts range from $47 to $53. Pay What You Will performances will be held on July 16 and July 22, with Pay What You Will tickets available for online purchase one week before opening. Student tickets are available for $12 for every performance.
Tickets are available now at puretheatre.org.
Additional information about Red Shirts can be found on PURE’s website at puretheatre.org or by calling the box office at 843.723.4444, Tuesday through Friday from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm.