Short works, feature-length films, comedy classics, documentaries, an awards party, and a Q & A with Bettendorf natives Scott Beck and Bryan Woods – co-screenwriters of the horror smash A Quiet Place – are just some what movie fans can look forward to at this year's Alternating Current festival, with more than a dozen events scheduled for venues in downtown Davenport and at Rock Island's Wake Brewery.

Presented at Moline's Black Box Theatre in the style of a radio play complete with live music, sound effects, and actors with scripts in hand, three new episodes of the locally produced podcast All You Care to Eat will be performed by the area troupe Comedy Thingy on August 25 and taped in front of a live “studio” audience.

More than two dozen local, regional, and national comedians will be bringing the funny to this year's Alternating Currents festival, with August 24 and 25 standup sets – plus one hilariously awful movie – scheduled to make patrons roar with laughter at four venues in downtown Davenport.

Dead Man's Cell Phone

Described by the New York Times as “a hallucinatory poetic fantasy that blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving,” Tony Award nominee Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone will enjoy its area debut at Davenport's QC Theatre Workshop August 24 through September 9, Ruhl's funny and thoughtful comedy inspiring SFGate.com to laud the author's “gifts of probing humor, vivid imagination, and poignant humanity.”

On August 25, a quartet of art in a wide variety of mediums will brighten the streets and venues of the 2018 Alternating Currents festival, with the scheduled events in downtown Davenport including an arts & crafts marketplace, a chalk-art festival, art workshops, and an exhibition by area artist Glenn Boyles.

Encaustic pieces and mixed-media works by artists from both sides of the Mississippi River will be on display August 24 through October 12, as Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center presents Breathe, a collection of works by Carol Hamilton of Harvard, Illinois, and The Grayed Air, a creative assemblage by the Davenport-based Matt Pulford.

Headlined by an Adler Theatre engagement with the indie rockers of Dr. Dog, this year's Alternating Currents festival – boasting more than 100 events and performances at 16 Quad Cities venues – will feature concert sets with more than three dozen bands and solo performers from August 23 through 26, their music encompassing every genre from rock to folk to jazz to country.

For the first exhibition in the college's 2018-19 academic year, the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art will showcase works by artists who honed their skills at Augustana itself, with Five Alumni: Continuing to Create, from August 24 through October 27, presenting beautiful, fascinating, and resonant works by a quintet of the school's most gifted graduates.

Two venues in downtown Rock Island will co-host one exciting literary event when the Midwest Writing Center presents readings and a release party for the annual literary magazine THE ATLAS, the latest volume of which will, on August 15, be showcased in a late-afternoon event at the Rock Island Public Library and an evening celebration at the neighboring Rozz-Tox.

With the New York Times lauding Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Neil Simon for “writing at his ebullient best” and “making us laugh so effortlessly,” the playwright's California Suite will enjoy an August 16 through 26 staging in the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's 50th-anniversary season of returning audience favorites, marking the popular comedy's first performance at any area venue since 2007.

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