Numerous professional visiting artists come to campus each academic year to both display their creative talents and impart their expressive wisdom to the Hope community. They show and tell us, by virtue of their displayed talents and spoken wisdom, that the arts are important to our collective communities because they require response and engagement, making us more mindful and inspired; making us more human.
Four of those visiting artists sat down separately with a Hope faculty member to answer how the arts contribute to the public good. It is a question whose answer is necessary toward a better understanding of what makes the arts important in our lives and world.
In this third installment of One Question, Director of Theatre Michelle Bombe sits down with American playwright Nathan Allen who is also the artistic director of the House Theatre of Chicago. Allen co-wrote “The Sparrow,” a play performed at the college during the fall of 2015, for which Allen returned to campus to direct. The play, “Rose and the Rime,” was written and created and directed by Allen too, in 2006-07, in a collaborative effort with the Hope cast and design team. That Hope production earned the prestigious honor of being selected to be performed during the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (ACTF) National Festival in Washington, D.C., in April, 2008.