Student theater season spans 1990s video games, AI, and murder mystery
Photo courtesy of GRCC
Grand Rapids Community College’s GRCC Players will take audiences from the 1848 Oregon Trail to a tech-driven future, with an utterly disastrous murder mystery opening night, across three productions exploring the theme “Under Pressure.”
“This season, we explore what it means to survive, to persevere and to perform under pressure,” said Jonathan Wheeler, Manager of Spectrum Theater. “Eveyone knows what it feels like to be under pressure, and the plays we chose approach that experience in different ways. There’s humor, grief, and the determination to keep going. This gives our students and our audiences plenty to connect with.”
“The Oregon Trail” explores moving forward while living with depression. “Anthropology” considers grief in a digital age and what we would do to hold on to someone we love. “The Play That Goes Wrong” brings the pressure directly to the stage as a theater group tries to hold it all together while it all falls apart.
Fall 2026 Main Stage: “The Oregon Trail”
Nov. 5-7, 2026 • 7:30 p.m. • Spectrum Theater
By Bekah Brunsetter
A play-meets-video-game that moves between a modern-day middle school computer lab and the Oregon Trail of 1848 to explore depression and the parallels between two young women separated by generations.
Winter 2026 Lab Theater: “anthropology”
Jan. 21–23, 2027 • 7:30 p.m. • Spectrum Theater, Lab Theater (Room 201)
By Lauren Gunderson
A woman coping with her sister’s death creates an AI version of her, blurring the boundaries between technology, consciousness and grief while raising questions about how far we should go to hold on to those we’ve lost.
Winter/Spring 2027 Main Stage: “The Play That Goes Wrong”
April 8-10, 2027 • 7:30 p.m. • Spectrum Theater
By Jonathan Sayer, Henry Lewis and Henry Shields
An accident-prone theater company attempts to stage a 1920s murder mystery as everything that can possibly go wrong does, resulting in an Olivier Award-winning farce filled with escalating chaos.
Learn more: https://grcctheater.ludus.com/index.php
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