Theatre professor Todd Quick, shown here directing a dress rehearsal last fall for Love/Sick, will direct a community co-production of Our Town in November
MONMOUTH, ILLINOIS (September 5, 2025) — By serving as cast and crew, student work is always featured prominently in theatre productions at Monmouth College, but this year's season will also highlight their writing and directing talents.
The theatre program's season will also highlight four billings that work separately and together to address themes of chaos, community and change.
"One only has to turn on the news to see that the world is in chaos. This season's offerings allow us to explore that," said professor Vanessa Campagna, who is joined on the theatre faculty by Todd Quick. "Our season also amplifies our president's vision that community matters," a reference to the culture of connection pillar in President Patricia Draves's foundations for the college. "As much as the works we'll be producing may focus on individual lives, they also draw attention to the human experience as communal."
Finally, said Campagna, "Life requires change. How do we embrace and perhaps even work toward change? The season seeks to stimulate our thinking along these lines."
The theatre department has embraced change, deciding a few years back to shelve its season-opening FusionFest, which featured ten-minute plays written by students in a twelve-hour window. But now, said Campagna, "There's a pulse in our department of students who are eager to write," so the first spring semester production will feature student-written works, also directed by students.
And the first fall semester production, Marisol, will be directed by Edrass Chavez-Alvarado ('26). The other two productions will be Our Town in the fall and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in the spring.
Marisol, by Jose Rivera: September 26-28, Hewes Library Studio Theatre
Last semester, Quick and Campagna had the students go through a rigorous process to pitch them ideas for a fall production. Chavez-Alvarado's pitch was judged to be the winning one, and he'll serve as director, too.
"We have two white faculty members in our department, and there are simply some stories that are not appropriate for us to direct," said Quick.
Edrass Chavez-Alvarado, shown here in a standout performance as Sebastian in The Little Mermaid, will direct the theatre department's first show of the academic year
Chavez-Alvarado is more than qualified, as he's lived and worked in New York City, where Marisol is set. The talented senior of Puerto Rican heritage from Chicago, who excelled in an upper-level directing course and was recognized for his work at a Kennedy Center regional theater festival in Wisconsin, will be the first Monmouth student to direct a full-length play since Amanda Grissom in 2017.
"It's a testament to Monmouth that we really know our students," said Campagna. "Edrass gets to bring his identity into the work."
Asked to simplify the plot of Marisol to a sentence or two, she replied, "Apocalypse. Society experiencing tumult. Social, political, cultural tension."
Our Town, by Thornton Wilder: November 20-23, Wells Theater
Simply put, Quick called Wilder's 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning work "one of the most important plays in American theatre history. . . Every day of the year, it's performed somewhere in the US, nearly 100 years after it was written."
Sixty years after it was written, Monmouth's theatre department staged the play in the relatively new Wells Theater, and it returns there 27 year later. Set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, from 1901-13, the story is told in three acts, following the Webb and Gibbs families as their children, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, fall in love and marry, ultimately exploring universal themes of life, love, and death.
Universal indeed, said Quick, who will direct the community co-production.
"I think we can all recognize our community in this play," he said. "We're going to exploit that by working with the Warren County History Museum to add some Monmouth-specific pieces to the lobby display. But even without that, people will see Monmouth in Our Town."
Quick also noted that Our Town was written as "a minimalist production, which in the 1930s was revolutionary. But that style has had staying power. People realized he was really onto something with this."
Breaking Ground: A Festival of Short New Works, by Monmouth students: February 20-22, Studio Theatre
While FusionFest was an adrenaline-based rush to complete a work, Breaking Ground "will be a much longer process," said Campagna, who said a call for interest just went out to theatre students. "This will be a four- to five-month process. We're not sure yet how the format will play out. It could be three one-act plays, or between five and seven ten-minute plays, or some combination. We're trying not to be too prescriptive."
Either way, said Quick, it will be "brand-new material that has never been performed."
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, created by Rebecca Feldman: April 17-19, Wells Theater
Campagna will direct the musical comedy, which features music and lyrics by William Finn and a book written by Rachel Sheinkin. The action takes place in a middle-school gymnasium and, said Campagna, features "themes of competition, of validation and the self, of striving and achievement, and of growing pains."
Although it's a comedy, "there are also poignant moments of how vulnerable the process of learning can be," she said. "There's also a message that winning isn't everything."
The musical works well following on the heels of Our Town.
"Our Town and Putnam County Spelling Bee speak to each other," she said. "They both tell us to focus on what really matters."
