Leaves
Written by Lucey Caldwell
Directed by Owen Skarbalus
February 28th – March 9th
UC Independent Media Center

After attempting suicide during her first term at university, Lori has come back home. It’s only been a few weeks, but things have gone badly wrong. None of the rest of the family knows, or understands, what really happened. Her parents can’t fathom what has caused the sudden change in their daughter, and her two young sisters are confused by their feelings of abandonment and betrayal. The three girls struggle to define who they are and where they might be going. A poignant family drama, LEAVES displays Lucy Caldwell’s gift for keenly sensitive observation.

Space Girl
Written by Mora V. Harris
Directed by Nolan J. Rice
June 13th – 22nd
Parkland College Second Stage Theatre

Arugula Suarez just wants to fit in. But it’s not easy when you’re a sixteen-year-old alien from the planet Zlagdor. Stuck in a world where the only things that make sense are roller derby and salad, Arugula and her father, Nancy, must find out what it means to be human before time runs out for Planet Earth.

The Laramie Project
Written by Moises Kaufman and Member of the Tectonic Theater Project
Directed by Mathew Green
August 8th – 17th
Parkland College Second Stage Theatre

The Laramie Project, by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project, was written in reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The play is an example of verbatim theatre, which draws on hundreds of interviews with inhabitants of the town, as well as the actors’ own journal entries and published news reports.

The Shadow Box
Written by Michael Cristofer
Directed by Mark J. Highland
September 26th – October 5th
Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center

In this compelling dramatic triptych, three terminal cancer patients wrestle with the toll their disease takes on themselves and their loved ones.

If All the Sky Were Paper
Written by Andrew Carroll
Directed by Marshawn Bingham
November 7th – 16th
Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center

After bestselling author Andrew Carroll found a riveting, heartfelt letter written by a distant cousin deployed as a pilot in World War II, he embarked on a trip to all fifty states and to more than thirty countries across the globe, including two active war zones, in search of more wartime correspondences. The letters and emails he found—by combat troops, medics, nurses, and chaplains, as well as family members on the home front and civilians caught in the crossfire of battle—came to represent to Carroll the “world’s great undiscovered literature.” They weren’t just about warfare, he realized, they were about the human condition itself—love and longing, courage and resilience, grief and hope, compassion and mercy, and, ultimately, reconciliation. Carroll’s journey, which is at times harrowing but also humorous, creates the narrative arc of the show. Already performed in high schools and colleges, community theatres, and major venues, including the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., across the country, If All the Sky Were Paper is a play that is both timely and timeless.