(POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.) – The award-winning play-making company The Debate Society returns to Vassar & New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater’s Mainstage with their haunted love story, The Light Years, with performances from Thursday, July 23, through Sunday, August 2, 2015.

Presented as an Inside Look Workshop in 2014, The Light Years was written by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and is again being directed by Oliver Butler. Set at the Chicago World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1933, The Light Years revolves around Steele MacKaye, a forgotten theatrical impresario commissioned to design and build the Spectatorium, a 12,000 seat theater at the 1893 fair. His audacious vision, and its life-changing consequences, paints a spectacularly vivid world of forgotten futures and the indomitable spirt of invention.

Tickets for The Light Years are $40. All tickets may be purchased online at Vassar & New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater’s Mainstage or by calling the Box Office at (845) 437-5599. The Box Office is located in the Powerhouse Theater on the Vassar campus, 124 Raymond Avenue in Poughkeepsie.

Now in its 31st season, Powerhouse Theater is a collaboration between New York Stage and Film and Vassar College dedicated to both emerging and established artists in the development and production of new works for theater and film.

The Powerhouse program consists of an eight-week residency on the Vassar campus during which more than 250 professional artists and 50 apprentices in the Powerhouse Training Program live and work together to create new theater works.

Recent highlights at Powerhouse include Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway-bound Hamilton; Bright Star, an original musical from Steve Martin and Edie Brickell; The Fortress of Solitude, Itamar Moses, Michael Friedman and Daniel Aukin’s musical adaptation of the best-selling novel by Jonathan Lethem, and Richard Greenberg’s The Babylon Line.  Many additional shows from past seasons have found their way to Broadway, Off-Broadway, and theaters nationwide, including Stephen Karam’s Sons of the Prophet and The Humans (Roundabout Theater); The Invisible Hand by Ayad Akhtar (NYTW), Found by Hunter Bell, Lee Overtree and Eli Bolin (Atlantic Theater Co), Michael Mayer and Peter Lerman’s Brooklynite (Vineyard Theater), Julia Jordan and Juliana Nash’s Murder Ballad (Manhattan Theater Club); and Pulitzer finalist Nathan Englander’s The Twenty-Seventh Man (The Public Theater; Old Globe Theater).

Other projects developed at the Powerhouse include the Tony Award-winning Side Man and Tru; the multi-award-winning Doubt by John Patrick Shanley; the groundbreaking Broadway musical American Idiot, and A Steady Rain, produced on Broadway in 2009 with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig.

New York Stage and Film (Johanna Pfaelzer, Artistic Director; Thomas Pearson, Executive Director; Mark Linn-Baker, Max Mayer, Leslie Urdang, Producing Directors)  is a not-for-profit company dedicated to both emerging and established artists in the development of new works for theater and film.  Since 1985 New York Stage and Film has played a significant role in the development of new plays, provided a home for a diverse group of artists free from critical and commercial pressures, and established itself as a vital cultural institution for residents of the Hudson Valley and the New York metropolitan region.

Vassar College (Ed Cheetham, Tom Pacio, Producing Directors) is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential, liberal arts college founded in 1861. Consistently ranked as one of the country’s best liberal arts colleges, Vassar is renowned for its long history of curricular innovation, and for the natural and architectural beauty of its campus. More than 50 academic departments and degree programs — from Anthropology to Cognitive Sciences to Urban Studies — encompass the arts, foreign languages, natural sciences, and social sciences, and combine to offer a curriculum of more than 1,000 courses.  Vassar College is sited in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.