Spring 2026 Theatre Newsletter

It is my pleasure to once again write a celebratory (and hopefully informative) preamble to our magnificent biannual newsletter, and to welcome you to the magical world of the Theatre Department!

As you will see in the following pages, the department is doing well. The Fir Acres Theatre has once again been filled with activity day and night. Our students were acting, directing, writing, designing, researching, stage-managing, producing, and engaging in every aspect of the making of the theatre.

Štĕpán Šimek, Professor of Theatre at Lewis & Clark CollegeAs is always the case, the Spring semester has been largely dominated by the preparations for our Senior Thesis Festival. This year, we graduating a record number of nervous, overworked, yet excited, creative, and energetic seniors. Our Senior Thesis Festival featured a fantastic array of original work including five fully staged productions, including a one-person show, and a fully realized staged reading of an original full-length play. The individual works are described in the following pages, and I won’t go into detail here. Suffice to say, that all the productions were a wonderful testimony to the kind of creativity, collaboration, and artistic rigor that we are proud to practice in our department. Additionally, since we like to pride ourselves on educating “Artists/Scholars,” all our seniors have also written extensive research papers as part of their thesis, and each student also presented their research project at a series of polished and informative research presentations. From 2026 Theatre Thesis Festival: Confessions of the Mad

The big mid-semester moment was our mainstage production of an original devised piece of “Dance Theatre.” This was the first time that we produced a mainstage in direct collaboration with our Dance concentration, and the play, When We Slept In Trees, was collaboratively written, designed, and produced by our Performance and Dance faculty, Rebecca Lingafelter, and Tiffany Mills, and students from both concentrations. It featured our thesis students, Jamie Kushnick, Gianvito Cassanelli, Naledi Tshehla, Zoe Chin, and Iman Agic, in significant roles in fulfillment of their Creative Thesis requirement, and the magnificent props were designed by a Design Concentration senior, Corey Near-Ansari. You will see pictures of the production and find out more about the process creating it as well as the experiences of the participating students in the following pages.

From Spring MainStage: “When We Slept in Trees”

In addition to the mainstage production and the five Senior Thesis performances, our students were also busy producing their own independent, albeit department-supported projects. This Spring, as we do each semester, we saw an energetic and fun-filled productions of several student written and directed plays at the rumbunctious “Once-Upon-a-Weekend” festival, another student generated a wonderful production of Authur Miller’s The Crucible, and as usual, the dance students put together the very popular Spring Dance Concert, “Dance Y.

Dance Y Spring 2026

And finally, to top off the cornucopia of the department’s activities, many of our students participated in the Festival of Arts as part of the college-wide “Festival of Artists and Scholars.” The heavily attended festival featured several performances and exhibitions by our graduating seniors, there were food trucks, music and art galore, and the overall festive and creative atmosphere of the event clearly demonstrated the extreme vitality of the arts at the college in general and the strength of the Theatre Department in particular.

Cast of Phantasmagoria by Ellie Schwartz '26

You will see that the following pages, describing the various student, alumni, and faculty activities in more detail, paint a picture of a department that is vital, fiercely creative, daring, and forward-looking. It is a place where students and faculty collaborate closely on the creative and intellectual exploration and the practice of the theatre. Theatre is a collaborative project; we are, as they say, “all in it together,” and as a Chair, I couldn’t be prouder about our students, our alumni, and my colleagues. Let us keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Štěpán S. Šimek

Chair, Theatre Department