July 2 through August 16, 2025
Great Expectations
Click here for tickets to our thirtieth anniversay season. To read more about Great Expectations, please scroll down.
Our thirtieth anniversary season features Twelfth Night and Great Expectations—two tales of transformation, redemption, and the long, winding river toward truth and belonging. In Twelfth Night, mistaken identity and misplaced affection give way to laughter, love, and revelation. In Gale Childs Daly’s adaptation of Great Expectations, Dickens’s characters navigate heartbreak and hope in a harsh and wondrous world.
Though penned centuries apart, these stories share an essential thread: a belief in transformation, in second chances, and in the mysterious ways life can surprise us.
Great Expectations Synopsis:
Pip, a young orphan living in the marshlands of Kent, is raised by his stern sister and her kind-hearted husband Joe, the village blacksmith. Life is simple and predictable—until one day, in the quiet of the churchyard, Pip is confronted by a terrifying escaped convict. Though the incident fades into his past, Pip’s secret act of helping the man lingers in his life for years to come.
Not long after this encounter, Pip is summoned to the decaying estate of the wealthy and reclusive Miss Havisham. At Satis House, he meets Miss Havisham’s beautiful but distant adopted daughter, Estella, and his desire for something more is ignited. Pip grows increasingly ashamed of his humble background and hopes to become a gentleman.
Years later, when a mysterious benefactor offers Pip the opportunity to move to London to receive an education, he believes his grand future is finally unfolding. With the guidance of the formidable lawyer Mr. Jaggers, his accountant, Mr. Wopsle, tutor Matthew Pocket, and the steady friendship of Pocket’s son Herbert, Pip enters a world of refinement far greater than he ever expected.
But as he rises in society, Pip discovers that his success is built on uneasy ground. The truth about his benefactor forces Pip to reckon with the assumptions, ambitions, and affections that have guided his path. When Pip’s social standing is threatened because of his benefactor’s past, he leans on Herbert and Mr. Wopsle to help secure his benefactor’s safety and his own. As secrets unravel, Pip confronts the complex web of identities, loyalties, and betrayals that bind him to Estella, Miss Havisham, and a past he can no longer ignore.
Told through the lens of Pip’s memory, Great Expectations is a richly woven tale of aspiration and ultimately redemption. Dickens asks us to consider: what truly defines a life well lived?
Directed by Samantha Martinson
Director’s Notes
What shapes a person? Is it the past that we’ve lived through or the future we hope to build? How do our choices echo through the lives of others?
Gale Childs Daly’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations invites us to explore these questions through the lens of imagination and transformation.
From the marshes to the city, from boy to gentleman, Pip chases a future that glimmers just beyond reach. In doing so, he is shaped not only by his desires, but by the forces of class, love, ambition, and, of course, expectation.
Daly’s Great Expectations combines all the grandeur and possibility of Dickens’s original novel with a contemporary sense of curiosity and play. With six actors and a musician, the story unfolds not as a traditional retelling but as a shared act of remembering—fluid, theatrical, and deeply human. The ensemble slips in and out of characters and time, revealing a kaleidoscopic world that blurs the line between past and present, truth and perception.
In revisiting Pip’s world, we’re also invited to reconsider our own: our assumptions about class, gender, power, and belonging. What does it mean to “better” oneself—and at what cost? What do we lose, or gain, when we try to change? These questions continue to pull at me as I reflect on the complexities of human transformation, the ways people change—or don’t. Though Pip’s journey takes place in another time, what he faces still challenges us today: What do we owe one another? What do we carry with us? And what happens when the life we imagined doesn’t quite match the one we find ourselves living?
Part memory play, part ghost story, part dream—and wholly a vivid reminder that the most powerful expectations may be the ones we place on ourselves.
Samantha Martinson
About the Playwright
Gale Childs Daly has been a playwright, director, teacher, text coach, and actor for many years. A graduate of the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now DePaul University), Daly has worked at the Goodman Theatre, the Alley Theatre, the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, the Great River Shakespeare Festival, and the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, among others. As a playwright,Gale adapted (in addition to Great Expectations), The Secret Garden, The Story of Opal, and The Lament for Ignacio Sanchez. Some of Daly’s directing credits include The Government Inspector, Julius Caesar, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. As an actor (under the name Gale Fury Childs), she has enjoyed playing such roles as Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Goneril in King Lear, and Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible. Daly is a freelance director, teacher, and text coach in the midwest. She is married to actor Jonathan Gillard Daly and has two children. Currently, she lives in Chicago.