Around the World in 80 days

Adapted by Mark Brown

Directed by Sara Freeman

In his novel, Jules Verne writes that Phileas Fogg didn’t so much travel arund the world as “describe a circle” around the globe. Verne’s images speaks to Fogg’s seeming emotional detachment and the mathematical and geographical challenge of circumnavigating the globe in 1872 [. . .] Circles also make a useful metaphor for much of what has happened to us while doing this show: we’re tracing several circles round and closing them together. We’re coming, like Fogg, to a place at once old and familiar and yet made new.

For me, personally, a circling back has also been underway. I am a recent arrival to the U of O campus, but I an originally from the Pacific Northwest and after a long and productive journey away, I too have been able to come to a new and old home. Doing this show has allowed me to work with a group of actors willing to see how fully they can tell a story, how inventive they can be, and what sort of journey around and back again they can undertake. In this process, I. have been discovering my faculty colleagues in ways both fresh and deep. And now comes the audience, the people we think of all the while we prepare. I welcome you to journey with us around and back again.

–Sara Freeman

As You Like It

Directed by Jack Watson

Lies, banishment, misunderstandings, elaborate schemes, cross-dressing- Shakespeare’s most joyous romantic comedy.

Metamorphoses

Based on the Myths of Ovid

Directed by John Schmor

Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses brings Ovid’s tales to stunning visual life. Set in and around a large pool of water onstage, Metamorphoses juxtaposes the ancient and the contemporary in both language and image to reflect the variety and persistence of inevitable change, “…powerful, moving, funny…sexy.”

Ecodrama Festival

Artistic Director Theresa May

Earth Matters Onstage: Ecodrama Festival of New Plays

“What is the role of theatre in a sustainable future?”

Ten days of readings, workshops, performances, and discussions of the scripts that are finalists in the Playwrights’ Contest including talk-backs with the playwrights. Ecodrama stages the reciprocal connection between humans and the more-than-human world. It encompasses not only works that take environmental issues as their topic, hoping to a raise consciousness or press for change, but also work that explores the relation of “sense of place” to identity and community.