Theater at Princeton is a moveable feast. Everywhere you look, someone is staging an event. Walking around campus, you might stumble upon the Princeton Shakespeare Company rehearsing Twelfth Night in a college courtyard, or the annual Triangle Show musical practicing the trademark kickline, or a Black Arts Company production of a vital new African-American play in the Matthews Acting Studio, or a gathering of the improv comedy group Quipfire! . . . Learn more

. . . or a Moliere play performed in French by L’Atelier in a college common room, or a Princeton University Players version of a Sondheim musical at Frist, or a Sam Shepard play at Theatre Intime, or a Program in Theater and Dance senior thesis production of an original student-written play at the state-of-the-art Berlind Theater, or a world-class production of a classic or contemporary play at Princeton’s professional theater – the Tony Award-winning McCarter. If you’re an actor, a playwright, a director, a designer or a dramaturg, you can spend your entire extracurricular year moving from one show to the next. And if you’re an audience member, just sit back and enjoy a rich and diverse menu of theatrical fare! You not only can make theater at Princeton, you can also study it. The Program in Theater and Dance of the Lewis Center for the Creative and Performing Arts is the curricular wing of Princeton’s lively performance community. We offer a Certificate Program in Theater and Dance, with an emphasis on theater, with courses in acting, directing, playwriting, design, dramaturgy, theater history and performance criticism taught by professional artists, journalists and scholars. Most courses are devoted to studio work – learning by doing; but we also value the opportunity a great liberal arts university like Princeton affords to connect the arts of theater to the wide range of interests represented in our faculty and student body. At the prompting of a Professor of Slavic Languages and a Professor of Music, in 2007 we staged the original version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, seen for the first time with music written by Prokofiev for a 1937 production. In the spring of 2008, a class exploring how best to stage the plays of ancient Greece on the contemporary stage, taught in conjunction with the program in Hellenic Studies, will fly to Athens for spring break to visit ancient theater and work with Greek scholars and theater professionals. Theater at Princeton moves wherever it needs to in order to stage on the cutting edge! [close]