Theater

Department Head

Professor Westfall

Associate Professor O'Neill (Acting Dept. Head, Fall 2019)

Performance and academic inquiry, theater practice, interdisciplinary methods, and the study of the world’s dramatic literature complement one another in the theater department’s approach to a liberal arts education. Theater at Lafayette College includes both teaching and learning initiatives that help students apply theater ideas and practice to analyzing visual, textual, and performance modes of expression and understanding the world. Thus, students are encouraged to consider theater as an art form with social and political dimensions, discovering through research into its complex history and diverse traditions around the globe an aesthetic of performance that is firmly grounded in both theory and practice.

By emphasizing collaboration and faculty mentoring through theater productions that focus on student-centered learning and artistic growth, the theater department educates students in ways that will prepare them for graduate study and professional careers in theater and related fields. The department is committed to expanding the range and depth of its offerings by bringing theater artists to Lafayette for residencies, workshops, and master classes; such endeavors create valuable links between individual students and established theater artists. Professional theater internships, interim theater courses in New York and London, and faculty-led semesters abroad, for instance, push students to stretch the boundaries of their college experience, fostering connections between the education they receive in laboratory, classroom, and production at Lafayette to the professional theater and to the larger world.

In accord with the aims of a liberal arts education, the department encourages all Lafayette students, regardless of major or minor, to refine their theater knowledge and gain theater expertise by taking electives in theater and by becoming cast or crew members in departmental productions, which are open to all matriculating students. The department helps to shape and enrich campus life through its production season, which draws the vast majority of its audience from the Lafayette community.

Theater Courses