As the spring season rolls around, the Contra Costa College’s Drama Department is working tirelessly for the upcoming Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), which will be held in Spokane Washington on February 18th through the 23rd. The play CURSED: The House of Atreus, written by playwright and CCC professor Carlos-Manuel Chavarría, is selected to perform there.
Angelina LaBarre, drama club supervisor and program director, hopes that after the festival, the recently recreated drama club can get off the ground begin to meet regularly.
The Drama Club was recreated last semester after being dormant during the height of the pandemic, and it currently has about 10 members, including the five officers. The club’s officers are Eryn Yoo, Rosa Villanueva, Will Parsley, Victoria Zaragoza, and Nikhil Masand. So far, only one or two meetings have been held, and with the festival, as well as rehearsals for two productions – “God of Carnage” and “Poor Clare” coming up, everyone is working tirelessly.
Despite not having met that often, the Drama Club officers are still hopeful about the future of the club, hoping that with time, they can increase the member size and with it, have more activities and events.
Will Parsley, the club’s secretary, expressed hope for the future of the club.
“Definitely [want] to have more people invested in it, and more members, and I hope that we can do a lot of fun things and fun projects,” Parsley said. “In the past, drama clubs did haunted houses, and another idea was going outside the school to see professional performances, so fun field trips like that.”
The drama department is stricter on budgeting and what they can and cannot do for programming, whereas the drama club aims to be more student run and oriented, allowing more freedom and a wider variety of activities and events to do and attend. The department is also composed of the many drama and theater classes, and is responsible for putting on performances and the John & Jean Knox Theatre that’s located on campus.
“I think the main goal right now for the club is to have the play [CURSED] perform over there, that’s what I want to do, I want to help them have that experience,” Rosa Villanueva, the club’s vice president, said. “I want them to be able to perform, and in the future, if there’s more performances that are selected to perform in that festival, I want them to be able to go over there, like, not feel excluded because the club doesn’t have the budget.”
With the play “CURSED” performing at the festival, the sentiment from the club officers is that more students will join the Drama Club, and be interested in theater. The drama club is open to any students who enjoy theater and acting, and those who enjoy the technical aspects of it, such as lighting, sound, set design, and more. The club is also open to those who maybe want a change of pace, and who are joining for fun or curiosity, or in Villanueva’s words, if they “have nothing better to do.”