The Department of Theatre Arts mounts a variety of productions each year: a faculty-directed play is presented each semester in the Norton Clapp Theatre, a festival of student-directed scenes takes place in the fall, and the Senior Theatre Festival is eagerly attended every spring. Recent faculty-directed productions include Indecent, Life is a Dream, Telephone, Stupid F*cking Bird, Penelopiad, Antigone, Threepenny Opera, You On the Moors Now, The Sea Gull, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, Twelfth Night, Rent, The Force of Habit, A Streetcar Named Desire, 365 Days/365 Plays, Spring Awakening, and In the Next Room. Plays directed by students as part of their Senior Theatre Festival include 4.48 Psychosis, The Effect, Woman and Scarecrow, The Chairs, Lungs, Bright Room Called Day, Peter and the Starcatcher, Narvis, Eurydice, Hedda Gabler, Quake, Rabbit Hole, The Trestle at Popelick Creek, How I Learned to Drive, Baltimore Waltz, The Pillowman, Proof, Lunacy, Afterlife: A Ghost Story, Gnit, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Recent Tragic Events, Looking for Normal, Macbeth, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Hamlet.
Guest Artists and Scholars
The Matthew Norton Clapp Endowment for Visiting Artists is a resource for attracting contemporary luminaries of theatre who enrich the campus life through workshops and presentations. Past guest artists have included Dave Malloy, Lydia Garcia, Annie Smart, Bill T. Jones, Holly Hughes, Steven Dietz, Russell Davis, and C. Rosalind Bell, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners Edward Albee and Robert Schenkkan. The Department of Theatre Arts encourages all university students, regardless of major, to participate in all aspects of theatrical production, both onstage and behind the scenes.
The Department of Theatre Arts encourages all university students, regardless of major, to participate in all aspects of theatrical production, both onstage and behind the scenes. Functioning independently of the department, student-initiated theatre projects occur throughout the year in Rausch Auditorium and other campus venues.