Performed: Spring 2012
Director: Adrian Giurgea

First appearing in 1891, Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening wasn’t performed until 1906, due to its revolutionary perspective on the agonies of adolescence. Colgate presented the Jonathan Franzen translation of the German classic, with attention to the strains and pressures placed on young people in our contemporary society.

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Performed: Spring 2011
Director: Simona Giurgea

L’Hereux Stratageme, a brisk, sophisticated comedy written in 1733 by Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux and brilliantly translated as Successful Strategies by Timberlake Wertenbaker, depicts a world of social immobility. Servants and masters alike, animated by ardent and urgent desires, chase love where they see it. Speaking Marivaux’ demonstratively artificial language—encumbered as it is by deception and self-delusion—the Commedia-dell’Arte inspired characters run around in circles, buzzing with energy, going nowhere until reality catches up with them. Colgate’s production of this frenetic comedy explored resonances between the social life of eighteenth-century France and the etiquette of today’s online culture.

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Performed: Fall 2010
Director: April Sweeney

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Performed: Fall 2009
Director: Simona Giurgea

In Jack, or the Submission (1955) and The Future is in Eggs (1957), French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco satirizes life as lived in accordance with norms originating in prejudice. He finds inspiration in the absurdity of a world in which objects dominate and people are socially conditioned never to question the status quo. With humor and intelligence, he invites us to observe while being observed. As they march enthusiastically in the tunnels of conformism, the characters in these two plays appear ridiculous in their lack of perspective, hilarious in their instinctual force, and frustrating in their obstinacy. Yet, the noise they produce sounds strangely close to the music of our own lives.

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Performed: Spring 2009
Director: Simona Giurgea

A raw, early work by celebrated American playwright Naomi Iizuka. Set in a world of street kids where, as one of the characters in the play puts it, “Stories and lies add up to something like the truth.”

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Performed: Spring 2008
Director: Simona Giurgea

Written by playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz, The Marriage (1948) is structured as the dream of a Polish soldier stationed in France during the Second World War. The soldier, Henry, dreams about going home, where the war has transformed all he once cherished into a nightmare. Struggling to adapt to the violence that surrounds him, Henry ascends to incredible power through his dream but looses his soul along the way. “What does it matter that I’m healthy when my actions are sick?,” he asks himself. Through Henry’s dream, The Marriageaddresses isolation and communion, power and fear, force and the loss of dignity–all through a plot centered on family, home, and love.

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Performed: Spring 2007
Director: Adrian Giurgea

The University Theater staged August Strindberg’s powerful drama of seduction and class intrigue in two separate, simultaneous productions, offering audiences two distinct interpretations of this famously enigmatic play.

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