Past Senior Thesis Productions
2024-2025
- Kayla Bey, Trace Origins (playwriting)
- Two married women return to Brazil together to renew their wedding vows, but they quickly learn that their marriage has not been and never will be solely about them. A play about love and its absence, language and its absence, and cultural differences that are never absent; a play about persistence, loneliness, and growing old, as much as it is about happily ever after and the children that follow.
- Avery Hansberger, An Actor Prepares? A Fictional and Non-Definitive Guide to Acting (performance - acting)
- Inspired by Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, this senior thesis follows a student learning to act under the tutelage of an acting teacher specializing in being “real”. The thesis explores different techniques and lessons pioneered by 20th-century acting teachers while questioning what it means to train as an actor.
- Cas Li, while True (playwriting)
- Amidst a quarter-life crisis, overachieving Chinese-American tech entrepreneur Sisi jets off to their ancestral motherland in search of connection and clarity. But when their nonstop flight to Beijing quite literally refuses to stop—trapping them in an endless time loop—reality begins to fracture, pulling them through visions of magpies, ideal selves, and the echoes of what-has-been and what-could-be. Blending sci-fi, mythology, and existential philosophy, while True is a meditation on the recursive nature of becoming.
- Emma Rogers, Out of Reach (musical playwriting)
- High school is Penny’s chance to reinvent her image, a fresh start. Lorelei dreams of a simple, quiet life. When their paths cross, they can’t help but want what the other has. Facing the pressures of their peers, mothers, and social media, will these young women be able to uncover their authentic truth beyond our filtered realities?
- Jonah Sorscher, Expectations (playwriting)
- After years of unsuccessful auditioning in New York City, 26-year-old Margot returns to her childhood home to live with her parents. But when she receives a callback for a theatrical adaptation of Great Expectations, all bets are off. Racing against the dawn of adulthood and the pressures that it brings, she holes up in the attic to method act the role of Miss Havisham, a woman who has fashioned her entire life to remain trapped in a single moment of heartbreak. As fiction and reality begin to blur, so do past and present, ultimately offering the question: what happens when we can't outlive our own expectations?
- Haley Stark, The Earthen Brothers; or, The Unmaking of the Übermensch (mixed media script)
- Nia Weeks, Our Friend Lyssa! (playwriting)
- Lyssa wants to host a dinner. Lyssa invites over five friends she hasn’t spoken to in awhile. Lyssa turns on the oven and sets the table. Lyssa hides a knife in her pocket. Lyssa is not herself tonight.
2023-2024
- Kristian Hardy, A Sweet Tea Communion (performance)
- A Sweet Tea Communion is a one-woman show following a burnt-out church girl in search of liberation. Spoken word, comedy, dance, and song are woven together to push boundaries, conjure new histories, and let one's inner light shine.
- Mireya Sanchez-Maes, How to Kill a Goat and Other Life Lessons (playwriting)
- How to Kill a Goat and Other Life Lessons is a joyous and unflinching exploration of growing up Mestiza in the New Mexico borderlands. It is queer, bilingual, musical, joyful, and raw.
2022 - 2023
2021-2022
2020-2021
2019-2020
2018-2019
