The Theatre Program at Spoon River College has announced their season of plays for the 2023-2024 academic year. The program produces one play each fall and one play each spring.

For Fall 2023, SRC Theatre will present the 1962 absurdist drama Exit the King by French playwright Eugene Ionesco. The play explores death through the rapid decline of Berenger the First, king of an unspecified land. Four hundred years old at the time of the play, Berenger moves through recognizable stages of loss and existential confusion as his kingdom, in apparent sympathy with the King’s withering, gradually crumbles around him. Berenger is attended throughout by his first wife, his current wife, his doctor, his nurse, and one guard. The play includes gentle comedy as well as drama.

Spring 2024 will see the 1978 dark comic thriller Deathtrap by American playwright Ira Levin. Nominated for four Tonys and winner of the Edgar Award for Best Play, Deathtrap presents Sidney Bruhl—a middle-aged, once-popular writer of thrillers for the Broadway stage—enduring an alarming slump. Sidney concocts a plan to murder one of his student playwrights and produce the young man’s stunningly good play as Sidney’s own. Complicating the plan are Sidney’s wife, Myra, his lawyer, Porter, and Helga ten Dorp, the psychic next door. Deathtrap is a satisfying thriller with plenty of laughs as well as surprises and twists.

Performances of Exit the King are November 3-5, 2023, while Deathtrap will run March 1-3, 2024. All SRC Theatre productions are presented in the Taylor Hall Theatre on the SRC Canton Campus. Participation in productions is open to current SRC students as well as residents of the Spoon River College District. Open auditions for each upcoming show will be announced. For more information, contact Douglas Okey, director of the SRC Theatre Program, at 309-649-6308.