Oklahoma! will have an innovative and inspired set design.

By Luis Fernando Rodriguez

When it came time for Professor Marie Anne Chiment to design the set for Oklahoma! she looked directly to the source material to get her initial inspiration.

As fall approaches, we are gearing up for our 26th annual New Voices Festival, done in collaboration with Philadelphia Young Playwrights, a program geared towards honing creativity and literacy through the art of playwriting.  This year, the New Voices Festival will feature eight full-length plays and two monologues all written by students who have won the annual playwriting competition. Over 1,000 scripts are submitted each year from over 30 different local middle and high schools.

Our final show of the season is Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, adapted and directed by Douglas C. Wager based on the book of the same name by Rachel Simmons (pictured below). This verbatim theater piece explores the heartbreaking world of bullying and relational aggression among pre-teen and teenage girls. Using the information in the book, as well as additional interviews with educators and girls, Wager creates revealing portrait of female relationships.

For our third show, we are presenting the Shakespearean classic Macbeth in the Tomlinson Theater. A staple in high school English course, the plot of Macbeth is very familiar: the tragedy of a Scottish soldier whose blind ambition leads him to a bloody end.