2024 Theatre Thesis Festival

The Theatre Thesis Festival showcases the work of our senior theatre majors. All students are enrolled in Theatre 450 - Senior Seminar. The Seminar provides the academic context for a capstone experience that normally includes both a creative project and a written thesis. By “creative projects” we mean theatre productions supported in a Festival context. Because we have three concentrations within the major – dramatic literature/theatre history, performance, and design/technical theatre – our Festival features a mixture of scripted work, new plays, devised performance, design and scholarship.

TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE

This year’s festival:

EVENING A

Wednesday April 17th and Friday April 19th, 2024

7:30pm - Requiem

An original dance composition based on the stages of grief that follow the loss of a loved one. 

8:30pm - Waitress: the Musical

The piece follows a talented, small-town pie baker named Jenna who experiences an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy with her abusive husband Earl. She learns how to break cycles of female generational trauma and trust herself through her female co-workers, other women in her life and an affair with her gynecologist.

Content Warning: physical and verbal abuse against women, mentions of suicide

EVENING B

Thursday April 18th and Saturday April 20th, 2024

7:30pm - Achilles and Patroclus

Explore one of the oldest stories of companionship through the adaptation of Madeline Miller’s beloved novel, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and Achilles and Patroclus by James T. Washburn. This play is a gripping tale of love, laughter, loss, and growing up. Let yourself be transported in time to Ancient Greece and era of the gods, to the beauty of meeting and melting of two people as they wrestle with their individual predetermined destinies and the difficulties in ensuring each other’s legacy.

8:30pm - The Monkey’s Paw

Written by W.W. Jacobs, this play is a textile-infested 1911 horror play set in a world of patterned cloth and masked faces. The show is inspired by the classic ghost stories of M.R. James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as television programs like The Muppets and Fraggle Rock. It focuses on a family torn apart by a magical wish granting object: a gnarled monkey paw. Witness the terrifying cost of incomprehensible power and flippant greed that the Monkey’s Paw will unleash.

Content Warning: Suicide, Gunshot Sounds, Child Death, Flashing Lights

9:30pm - Misery

Written by William Goldman and based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, Misery is about a woman named Annie Wilkes, who rescues Paul Sheldon, the severely injured writer of her favorite romance novels, the Misery Series, from his wrecked car in a winter storm. 

Content Warnings: Flashing lights, Violence and gore, Herbal cigarette smoke, Gun shot effect

TICKETS:

• Admission is FREE but tickets are required as seating (General Seating) is limited.

• Stop by the Theatre Box Office (Fir Acres Theatre) between 1-5pm beginning Monday April 15th (through Friday April 19th) or order them online!

• Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

We also have digital program manuals this year!