Pat Bitton

Each year, Dell’Arte MFA students create a holiday show that plays, largely free of charge, to the community from Point Arena to Cave Junction. The students not only write, design, choreograph, costume, light and stage the production but also take it on the road to schools, community centers and theatres large and small. Being Dell’Arte […]

Scholars have argued for centuries as to when, or even whether, Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew. What’s not in doubt is that John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s successor as house playwright for the King’s Men, wrote The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, as a sequel. This piece, completed in the early 17th century, tells […]

Did you know Neverland was a sailing ship before it was Peter Pan’s forever home? Me neither. But that’s just one of the fascinating details to emerge in Peter and the Starcatcher, Humboldt State University Theatre Department’s season opener. It’s a play with music (not a full-blown musical) that imagines a prequel to the Peter […]

Charles Darwin almost did not join HMS Beagle’s round-the-world voyage as the official naturalist. Professing a fear of blood, dissection and taxidermy — not to mention never having been to sea — he was an unlikely candidate for the role. But the strength of his quest for scientific knowledge prevailed, thanks to an appreciation of […]

Here on the North Coast, we are familiar with the tattooed bars on the chins of Native American women. But imagine the reaction of mid-19th century men and women seeing those markings on a white woman who appeared otherwise no different from them. That is the position Dell’Arte Community Development Director and faculty member Zuzka […]

It’s the superficially idyllic 1950s in post-war Middle America. The role of women is to be decorative and do good works. Lesbianism does not exist (after all, Queen Victoria said so). The only dark cloud threatening this Eden is the Red Menace. And so it is that we find ourselves, as members of the audience, […]