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The Eastern Echo Tuesday, May 20, 2025 | Print Archive
The Eastern Echo

Plays

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EMU Theatre’s ‘The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus’ finds childhood whimsy in the rural desert

By Frank Remski · Tuesday, April 15, 2025

“The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus” is the latest show from EMU’s Theatre For the Young Tour. Directed by MFA candidate Olivia Allen, the play follows a girl named Sheila and her friends in rural New Mexico. They get roped into conflict with animals and solve it with their ingenuity. The show is lively and funny, with strong messages around environmentalism and conflict resolution.

Kasey Donnelly as Dolly and Dakotah Myers as Francis.

EMU Theater presents One Man, Two Govnors

By Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson · Sunday, April 10, 2016

Eastern Michigan University’s Theatre Department will be performing Richard Bean’s slapstick comedy, One Man, Two Govnors this weekend in the Quirk Theatre. Nominated for seven Tony Awards, One Man, Two Govnors is the updated modern version of the 18th century Italian play, A Servant of Two Masters, written by Carlo Goldoni. Bean’s version opened at the National Theatre in London in 2011 where it became a hit success.

EMU Theatre hosts One-Act Festival

By Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson · Wednesday, March 23, 2016

The creative thoughts of Eastern Michigan University students formed in the Theatre Department’s student written and student directed One-Act Festival in the Frank Ross Laboratory Theatre this week. From the early 1990’s to present day, the One Act Festival has served the talents of EMU students in the art of playwriting, directing and performing.

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'Chesapeake' one-man show comes to The Yellow Barn

By Emily Slomovits · Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016

One-person plays are rare and not many have received wide circulation or much acclaim. This may be due to one thing: no matter how good a play is, it will succeed or fail depending on the actors in it, and obviously, with a one-person show, all the responsibility falls on a single actor. This can be a tremendous amount of pressure; learning an unusually large number of lines, being onstage non-stop for sometimes two hours or more and perhaps most importantly, having no other actor to interact with and be supported by.

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Encore Theatre presents 'Sondheim on Sondheim'

By Emily Slomovits · Sunday, Feb. 7, 2016

Stephen Sondheim is widely regarded as the grandfather of musical theatre. His career as a composer and lyricist has spanned nearly seven decades and his shows are some of the most beloved in the musical theatre repertoire: Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, A Little Night Music, Follies, Sunday in the Park with George and many more. But, among performers, his work is also known as some of the more difficult to perform and sing because of its unpredictability, density and complexity.

'The Piano Lesson' will be featuring EMU students Mishana Green as Berniece and Jeffrey DeVault as Boy Willie.

EMU Theatre to perform 'The Piano Lesson'

By Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson · Saturday, Feb. 6, 2016

Eastern Michigan University’s Theatre Department will continue their 2015-2016 main stage season with a one-week only performance of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize- winning play, “The Piano Lesson” opening this Wednesday in the Sponberg Theatre. “The Piano Lesson” is the fourth play in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, a collection of plays set in a different decade to reveal the African American experience in the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” is a drama and comedy that takes place after the Great Depression in 1936 Pittsburg where a family heirloom, a piano with ornate carvings, becomes the center of an argument between siblings, Bernice and Boy Willie.

Women’s SafeHouse: A realist performance about the violence against women in Turkey

By Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson · Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015

Told through reading and performance, audio and visual components, the two-act play “Women’s SafeHouse” opened for the first time in America at Eastern Michigan University’s Frank Ross Laboratory Theatre in Quirk Hall on Monday night. “Women’s SafeHouse,” written by Turkish playwright, Tuncer Cucenoglu, depicts a modern tragedy about 11 women and their stories at a safehouse in Istanbul, Turkey where they fell as victims of violence and abuse.

NBC's live performance of The Wiz sets records

By Kelsey Hawkins-Johnson · Sunday, Dec. 6, 2015

Hailing from New Jersey and casted as the well-known sweet girl of Kansas was newcomer, Shanice Williams, who performed Thursday night in NBC’s The Wiz Live. With her plaid skirt and natural curly hair, Williams portrayed a new version of Dorothy.

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'Little Shop of Horrors' exceeds expectations

By Emily Slomovits · Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015

In my three years at EMU, I’ve seen some wonderful theatre. But, the current main stage production, “Little Shop of Horrors,” is the best show I’ve seen here, hands down. Júlia Miyahara, a freshman majoring in international affairs, said, “I really like this musical, because it touches on a lot of real-life issues like poverty and domestic violence... I had very high expectations for this production, and it exceeded them by a lot.” The show is somewhat paradoxical – on one hand, it’s a frothy, entertaining and stylized show with catchy Motown music, while on the other, it’s a dark, grim, sometimes scary look at the lengths people will go to in order to get what they want.

Latest Podcast

Renowned journalist Beimeng Fu recalls her COVID-19 reporting experience on this weeks episode of Women Journalist COVID-19 Experiences. Check out this latest episode on Spotify! Or you can listen to their full unedited conversation at the Eastern Michigan University Archive website.

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