Dear
Class of 2015,
Trinity gives you many ways to combine classes in art, science, and the humanities. Your courses are already blending in conversations at Mabee and in your dorms. As you move through the middle of your Spring semester, I’d like to take this opportunity for a shameless plug that can help you focus on connections among your different classes: come see the Department of Human Communication and Theatre’s production of The Crazy Locomotive that opens next month (April 12-20)! I directed it, many of your fellow students are doing incredible work on it as actors, designers, technicians, and stage managers, and you shouldn’t miss it.
This fascinating, funny, strange 1923 play by Stanislaw Witkiewicz takes place aboard the engine room of a train hurtling toward its destruction. The set includes an enormous futuristic locomotive as well as a video backdrop of the passing landscape. The two international criminal masterminds who hijack the train want to discover the “Mystery of Existence” by reaching unprecedented speeds and eventual annihilation. In many ways, the play is about industrial civilization’s potentially fatal drive toward greater velocity. Along the way, the characters and set invoke the hypothetical trains Albert Einstein used to discover relativity as well as the manifestos of futurism, one of the most provocative and important artistic movements of the early twentieth century, and the origins of cinema. The play stages a fascinating, visceral intersection among physics, film, visual art, and theatre, while also condensing big questions rooted in history, political science, and philosophy.
The Crazy Locomotive is just one of many plays, music performances, art shows, and other events around campus that put the different ideas you’ve been studying on a collision course (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Take an hour out of your busy schedule and these worlds intersect.
Kyle Gillette
Trinity gives you many ways to combine classes in art, science, and the humanities. Your courses are already blending in conversations at Mabee and in your dorms. As you move through the middle of your Spring semester, I’d like to take this opportunity for a shameless plug that can help you focus on connections among your different classes: come see the Department of Human Communication and Theatre’s production of The Crazy Locomotive that opens next month (April 12-20)! I directed it, many of your fellow students are doing incredible work on it as actors, designers, technicians, and stage managers, and you shouldn’t miss it.
This fascinating, funny, strange 1923 play by Stanislaw Witkiewicz takes place aboard the engine room of a train hurtling toward its destruction. The set includes an enormous futuristic locomotive as well as a video backdrop of the passing landscape. The two international criminal masterminds who hijack the train want to discover the “Mystery of Existence” by reaching unprecedented speeds and eventual annihilation. In many ways, the play is about industrial civilization’s potentially fatal drive toward greater velocity. Along the way, the characters and set invoke the hypothetical trains Albert Einstein used to discover relativity as well as the manifestos of futurism, one of the most provocative and important artistic movements of the early twentieth century, and the origins of cinema. The play stages a fascinating, visceral intersection among physics, film, visual art, and theatre, while also condensing big questions rooted in history, political science, and philosophy.
The Crazy Locomotive is just one of many plays, music performances, art shows, and other events around campus that put the different ideas you’ve been studying on a collision course (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Take an hour out of your busy schedule and these worlds intersect.
Kyle Gillette
Class Marshal
