The guiding concept behind Eastern Mennonite University’s upcoming production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” is “drowning in excess,” says actress Makayla Baker. Fittingly, the performance begins with a shipwreck. Music, choreography, make-up and costumes inspired by carnivals and underwater dance create a visually and kinetically dyna ...More
This article was published in the EMU WeatherVane, a student newspaper.
The Black Box filled with students anticipating the first Gonzo theater of the year Inside the University Commons, past Common Grounds and the Art Gallery last Thursday.
Gonzo Theater, known as Gonzo, is a student run theater group w ...More
When volunteers were solicited, nobody immediately stepped forward. It was a tough request: tell a painful personal story before an audience of maybe 40, many of them strangers to each other, and watch seven people trained in playback theater re-tell it through an impromptu performance.
Yet Muhammad Afdillah—a visiting scholar with Eastern Mennonite University’s ...More
The twists and turns of several fairy tales taken from the Brothers Grimm are intertwined in the next Eastern Mennonite University theater offering, Into the Woods, a musical by Steven Sondheim with book by James Lapine.
Directed by Justin Poole, ass ...More
I am constantly asked, why theater? Why not film? Why choose such an impractical major? Do you ever want to be employed?
Why theater at such a small school? Of all the places to study theater, why EMU?
While I used to be annoyed by these questions because of my own doubts, I now enjoy answering these questions with confidence.
Theater may not se ...More
A photojournalist returning from war-torn Iraq deals with the images her mind cannot erase and the personal, marital and moral choices that define her life in the Eastern Mennonite University theater production, Time Stands Still, directed by senior Amanda Chandler.
Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Marguiles, Time Stands Still will be staged in the Lee E. Eshlema ...More
Her back pain began sometime during her sophomore year of high school. It wasn’t too bad at first, nothing out of the ordinary. Aches and pains are part of a basketball player’s life, especially when that basketball player plays as long and hard as Hattie Berg had. The sport had been her life for as long as she could remember: rec leagues, summer leagues, summer camps and eventually on to t ...More
Two weeks before his senior thesis project due date, Eastern Mennonite University senior theater and writing studies major Michael Bodner decided on a path he’d never tread: He wanted to write a tragedy.
“I’ve written a lot of comedy, satire and even horror, but I’ve never w ...More
For Izzy Howard, it’s hard to choose between her passion for play writing and her love of performing.
Lucky for her, she doesn’t have to.
For the past two years, the 16-year-old Eastern Mennonite High School junior has been participating in CrashHouse Collaborative Theater — a project started in 2008 that allows local high school students t ...More
