Welcome from the Chair

We have a wonderful opening to our season with a week-long residency by the Actors from the London Stage! The company will perform Shakespeare’s Macbeth for three performances in the Black Box Theater, September 29-October 1. The company will also be in classes throughout the CoA+A as well as in the English Department.

The Department of Theatre 2022-23 production season features an interesting array of offerings, including site-specific work in the University’s Cone Center and a touring children’s show, as well as a site-specific lab project based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

The second production of our season this fall will be These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnic, directed by Professor Robin Witt. Melanie Marnich’s play chronicles the life of Catherine Donohue and her co-workers at the Radium Dial Company in the 1920s. The freedom of being the first wave of women earning a living wage gave way to the horror of abuse at the hands of a corporation determined to keep their wrongdoing secret. Catherine’s court case, as she lay on her deathbed, paved the way for companies to be held responsible for workplace safety. This work of documentary fiction reaches across the last century to speak directly to today’s issues surrounding workers’ rights. November 17-20, Black Box Theater

Senior Lecturer Jay Morong will direct a workshop production of The Antipodes by Annie Baker. With their phones switched off, a group of people are sitting around a conference table telling stories about telling stories. As their individual tales get darker and darker (and perhaps the apocalypse is happening outside?), Annie Baker’s play asks, when a world is in crisis, what is the power of the stories we tell, and those that are left unsaid. November 30-December 3, Cone Center 210

In the spring of 2023, Visiting Assistant Professor Ron McClelland will be directing Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lynn Nottage’s tour-de-force is about the collision of race, class, and friendship in the early aughts. A group of small-town friends in the Pennsylvania Rust Belt have spent their lives on the local factory floor, and off hours sharing secrets, laughs and tears, at the local bar. But when lay-offs come in the Great Recession, life-long trust is the first victim, as they are pitted against each other in a heart-breaking fight for their livelihoods. March 16-19, 2023, Belk Theater

Last but not least, Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare Studies Dr. Andrew Hartley and Assistant Professor Laura Waringer will foray into Shakespeare’s As You Like It, creating a site specific theatrical experience not to be missed. April 2023, Van Landginham Glen, Botanical Garden.

Come and celebrate our students' unique talents with us! We welcome you to explore where theatre can take you!

With appreciation,

Delia Neil, Interim Chair of the Department of Theatre

past performances