Welcome!

The ISU Theatre division within the ISU School of Performing Arts provides a well-rounded curriculum that is both basic and innovative. Theatrical productions range from classics to contemporary, from intimate to large-scale, and from student-directed to faculty produced. The program is structured to provide a rich mixture of academic, design, and performance courses, coupled with a broad array of electives, enabling ISU students to pursue theatre as a profession or an avocation.

Mission Statement

The mission of Theatre ISU is to help students obtain a level of achievment appropriate to entry-level professionals in their specialty areas, or to use the confidence, expressiveness, and cooperative skills gained through their theatre studies at ISU to succeed in a diverse range of non-performance related careers. Students may choose to focus on performance (acting, directing, dance, and choreography), technical theatre, dance education, or achieve an Education degree with certification to teach theatre. All Theatre ISU students are expected to gain a broad-based knowledge of all major aspects of production, and a solid grounding in the history, theory, and literature of their art.

Careers in Theatre

Many careers develop directly or indirectly from a theatre background. Some of the more widely recognized careers include acting, directing, stage management, scene, costume, and properties construction and design, theatre management and publicity, playwriting, dance, and high school and college teaching. Other careers for which theatre is an excellent background include public relations, sales, advertising, radio, and television announcing, and, many other vocations in which successful inter-personal skills are necessary. Theatre students gain discipline, confidence, and a strong sense of team-building, all key skills in today’s economy.

The Department of Theatre is a fully accredited member of the National Association of Schools of Theatre (http://nast.arts-accredit.org/).

 

Current Production

The Philadelphia Story

In this 1939 American classic by Phillip Barry we meet the Lords of Philadelphia-literally. Tracy Lord's final preparations for her wessing to mining heir George Kittredge are complicated by the arrival of reporters from a muckraking scandal sheet and by the reappearance of her former husband, C.K. Dexter haven. The play served as a "comback vehicle" for Katherine Hepburn who also starred in the 1940 film, along with Cary Grant. The play is a delightful, stylized, romantic comedy replete with lots of "eye candy." Our costumes are designed by Edward Stevenson, the Pocatello boy who became a noted costumer for RKO studios, designing many costumes for this ear. The ISU costume shop will concert Stevenson's renderings into costumes for this production.