The Department of Theatre announced its production lineup for the 2021 – 2022 season under the theme “Changing Seasons,” inspired by the Torah, or Old Testament, Book of Ecclesiastes 3:1. Department Chair John Benitz said, “This particular biblical verse describes a time and place for all things: a time of birth and death, laughter and sorrow, illness and healing, planting and then reaping what we sow, a time to break down and a time to build, etc. In contemporary culture, the verse was adapted by musician Pete Seeger and made popular in the song Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) recorded by The Byrds. The selection committee felt that the idea of a changing season was a good metaphor for what we have been through together and how we are now entering into a new ‘season,’ changed, enlightened and stronger for what we have been through.”

The 2021-22 Season Selection Committee was comprised of Professors John Benitz, Thomas F. Bradac, Kristin Campbell, Drew Chappell, Nick Gabriel, and Tamiko Washington, as well as students Ruby Blakesleay, Lauren Grant, and Eva Wong. Tickets for the season will go on sale at the start each semester at tickets.chapman.edu.

Fall 2021

A time to gain, a time to lose…

Tartuffe by Molière
An original adaptation by Jenny Jacobs
Directed by Karole Foreman
Waltmar Theatre

In this timeless, charming, and clever play Molière, through brilliantly created characters, explores true hypocrisy within 17th-century French society. Join us for an evening filled with rhythm, rhyme,  and wit as we aim to excavate the false piety that remains in our own society using the theatrical traditions of the Comedy of Manners.

A time to laugh, a time to weep…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Directed by Thomas F. Bradac
Musco Center for the Arts

Shakespeare’s comic fantasy about love, dreams, and imagination is set in an enchanted forest on the outskirts of Athens where magical fairies cast spells on lost lovers while wandering “rustics” present a play before the king and queen on their wedding day. The character Puck reminds us at play’s end:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear. 

Spring 2022

A time to build up, a time to break down…

Native Gardens by Karen Zacarias
Directed by Sara Guerrero
O.L. Halsell Studio Theatre.

You can’t choose your neighbors! In this brilliant comedy, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. But an impending barbeque for Pablo’s colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spirals into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples’ notions of race, taste, class and privilege.

A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing…

Zanna Don’t! A Musical Fairytale by Tim Acito and Alexander Dinelaris
Directed by Nick Gabriel
Waltmar Theatre

Set in a world where homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuals are considered an oddity, the characters in the town Heartsville, USA, are all homosexual — or so we think, until one bold student writes a musical about forbidden heterosexual attraction in the army, and the true, closeted desires of two of the cast members come to the surface. A world much like our own, and the chaos that ensues when people love who they want to, gay or straight.