The Wabash College Theater Department has announced the College’s 2005-2006 theater.
In 2005-2006, seating for Theater productions will be by general admission, though free tickets are required for Theater productions.
Tickets for Fall Semester events will be available September 1, 2005. Tickets for Spring Semester events will be available on January 26, 2006.
Contact the Fine Arts Center Box Office by email at boxoffice@wabash.edu; phone: 765-361-6411; or by mail at Fine Arts Center Box Office, Wabash College, P.O. Box 352, Crawfordsville, IN 47933-0352. Box Office hours are Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12 noon and 1:30 to 4 p.m. The box office will open 90 minutes before curtain time for Theater events. Tickets not claimed at the Box Office 10 minutes prior to curtain will be released to the general public.
The Anderson Trial, by Saul Levitt, will start off the season at Wabash. Performances will be October 5-8 at 8 p.m. The performance will be in Ball Theater in the Fine Arts Center.
The Andersonville Trial is a striking courtroom drama about a famous event in American history: the military trial of Henry Wirz, who was commander of the Confederate prison at Andersonville during the Civil War.Torn by awful memories and coldly pursued by his prosecutor, Captain Wirz maintains that he ran Andersonville as a soldier acting under orders. The crux of this stirring play raises the question: When does individual responsibility to conscience transcend any power of authority?
“The Andersonville Trial is the pure and genuine quill of theatre, written to stand your hair on end.” —Morning Telegraph
The second production of the season will be the Studio One-Acts: The Vietnamization of New Jersey by Christopher Durang. Performances will be presented November 12-13 at 8 p.m. each evening.
In The Vietnamization of New Jersey, playwright Christopher Durang focuses his acerbic comic laser beam on the American family. Fusing black comedy, satire, and a generous dose of Durang garishness, the play ultimately arrives at a surprisingly moving delineation of American character.
“Christopher Durang is a one-man Yale lampoon. He is a diabolically comic writer whose ammunition is ridicule and whose weapon is scattershot.”—The New York Times
The third production of the season will be Churchill at Eight: Two Plays by Caryl Churchill. Performances will take place February 22-25 at 8 p.m. each evening in Experimental Theater.
The Wabash College Theater Department is pleased to present two of Caryl Churchill’s most highly acclaimed plays: Far Away and A Number. Far Away is a poetic howl of anguish at the increasingly tolerated levels of inhumanity in a world seemingly perpetually involved in conflict. In A Number, Churchill turns her attention to the subject of human cloning.
“More than any other writer, Churchill has transformed the theater into what it needs to be—a gymnasium that exercises the imagination, shakes up the moral sense, stretches the spirit”—London Times
The fourth and final production of the season will be The Braggart Soldier by Plautus, translated by Erich Segal, adapted and directed by James Fisher, which will be presented April 19-22 with performances starting at 8 p.m. each evening in Ball Theater.
Plautus’s The Braggart Soldier is, as scholar Dudley Fitts writes, “superbly funny; and it is a poem.” Plautus (254–184 B.C.) inspired his audiences to laughter by playing with the nature of theater and the relationship between actor and audience. In a new adaptation by James Fisher based on Erich Segal’s translation, this commedia dell’arte-inspired production aims to continue that tradition in a comedy with one of the longest and richest traditions on the comic stage. Its title character is the prototype for an enduring legacy of vainglorious fools and his descendants can be found in theater from Plautus to the great comedies of Shakespeare. Contemporary culture finds parallels for Plautus’s swaggering, pompous lunatic in films like Dr. Strangelove and Catch-22.