MONMOUTH, ILLINOIS (August 5, 2019) — A comedy, a murder mystery, and a holiday performance are the full-length productions scheduled to hit the Monmouth College stage during the 2019-20 theatre season.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, theatre-goers can immerse themselves in the holiday spirit with a production of A Child's Christmas in Wales, an adaptation of the famous Dylan Thomas work. Billed as "Christmas just the way Christmas always should be," the November 21-24 Wells Theater production will be directed by Monmouth theatre professor Todd Quick. Despite the fact that the production features a Welsh Christmas and the music is also Welsh, Thomas' piece has universalized the essence of Christmas as any child anywhere might perceive it. If the play has a plot, it is the story of Christmas Day itself, from its quiet, magical beginning full of thrilling expectations to the end when the boy Dylan creeps up to his bed, replete with the joy of a perfect Christmas. After the College's break for the actual Christmas, cast and crew will be hard at work preparing Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound, which will be staged at the Fusion Theatre Feb. 27-March 1. Attending the premiere of a new murder mystery, two feuding theatre critics soon find themselves inside the play-within-a-play and are implicated in the lethal activities of an escaped madman. Monmouth student Richard Eyre ('21) of Mount Prospect, Illinois, will direct the production. The final play of the season will be Lauren Gunderson's comedy The Revolutionists, which theatre professor Vanessa Campagna will direct April 16-19 in Wells Theater.
The plot revolves around "four beautiful, badass women" during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Playwright Olympe de Gouges, assassin Charlotte Corday, former queen Marie Antoinette and Haitian rebel Marianne Angelle hang out, murder Marat and try to beat back the extremist insanity in 1793 Paris. The season will once again open with FusionFest, the festival that takes short plays from idea, to script, to performance in a wild 24 hours. This year's new spin is that the Sept. 21 productions will be staged in the windows of the Fusion Theatre, with audience seating on Main Street. To purchase tickets for a production or for the season (at a 20 percent discount), go to monmouthcollege.edu/theatre.
