March 29th 2024
Brianna Anzures, RC Players

"Community Garden" is an evocative production conceived by Justin Borak, a Master’s candidate at West Virginia University. Orchestrated by the student-led R.C. Players, this play was a testament to our commitment to fostering creativity and community within the University of Michigan. Performed on March 29th and 30th at the Keene Theatre, this narrative unfolds in the heart of Uptown, Chicago, where the protagonist, Ralph, discovers the transformative power of community through his volunteer work at the Uptown City Gardens.

Eleven Months of Nuclear Summer by Sophie Mcintosh

March 16th 2024
Denise Bonsu, RC Players

Eleven Months of Nuclear Summer follows six staff members navigating the joy and politics of the summer camp preseason when the nuclear apocalypse takes away everything they have, except each other. Over the course of the next year, their numbers diminish as they jockey for power, fight for love, and maintain hope for as long as they can. The lines between love, sex, and friendship blur, with platonic and romantic love playing equally vital roles. Hope and community are the throughlines that keep the show moving forward. Flawed and deeply human characters fight to make both high- and low-stakes decisions; life and death are important, but so are the group’s sexual politics and vodka supply.

November 18th 2023
Emerson Lauster, The RC Players

We put on a full-length, student-written play called Where Orion Went! Our two show performances took place on November 16th and 18th and were open to the public. The show itself was meant to utilize the myth of Orion to give agency to those commonly reduced to narrative tools in stories. Throughout the weeks leading up to the performance, we had constant rehearsals, meetings, and workshops in order to produce this show to the best of our ability.

October 28th 2023
Roma Uzzaman, The RC Players

This was a shadowcast production of cult classic film The Rocky Horror Picture Show! We performed a stage production of the show while the film played on a screen in the background. The RC Players' production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was entirely organized, directed, acted, and costumed by students. Our mission was to promote love and learning of theater through active participation and hands-on learning, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a perfect example of that.

Much Ado About Nothing

December 3rd 2021
RC Players

The RC Players organization put on a production of Shakespeare's play, Much Ado About Nothing, set in a modern environment.

Failure: A Love Story

November 13th 2021
The RC Players

Failure: A Love Story was a full-length in-person performance, with a production team and cast completely made up of University of Michigan undergraduates. Each student took upon various responsibilities, including acting, directing, production roles, and technical direction. Failure has a wonderfully unique tone with themes of grief and the passage of time. It asks the audience to be empathetic towards bizarre and surreal characters who are grappling with their own mortality.

March 22nd 2019
RC Players

Every semester, the RC Players–a student-run theater organization–produces two full-length plays. This semester they produced “The 39 Steps,” a parody of a Hitchcock spy thriller by Patrick Barlow. It follows Hannay, a boring man with a boring life. One day, he meets a woman with a thick accent who says she’s a spy. When he takes her home, she is murdered. Soon, a mysterious organization called “The 39 Steps” is hot on Hannay’s trail in a nationwide manhunt.

November 30th 2018
RC Players

Bright Half Life was one of two full-length productions the RC Players puts on per semester. With this show they conveyed the ups and downs of two women’s romantic relationship. Bright Half Life portrayed the strife of many young same-sex couples who often times feel their story goes untold. Bright Half Life offered a very unique approach to storytelling and exposed students to a more experimental form of narrative. Rather than a traditional linear story arch, it used fragments and chopped up pieces of these two character’s lives as they fell in and out of love with each other.

Hamlet

March 30th 2018
Allison Burley, The RC Players

The RC Players created a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, made possible through an independent study with RC Drama professor Kate Mendeloff. The production strived to be unconventional and diverse in age, sexual orientation, and gender identity, in order to highlight the creativity and passion of as many people and perspectives as possible. They accomplished this through diverse casting, provocative costuming, and creative choices in setting and character work.

March 16th 2018
Emma Puglia, The RC Players

Every semester, the student-run theatre group RC Players produces two full-length plays. In the 2018 Winter semester, they produced Blithe Spirit, a farcical play by Noël Coward. It follows Charles Condomine, a novelist who has remarried after the passing of his first wife. One night, he invites a medium to his home to conduct a séance in order to gather information for his latest novel. However, this quickly backfires: as a result of the encounter, Charles finds himself haunted by his mischievous first wife, Elvira. Throughout the play, Elvira does her best to undermine Charles’s relationship with Ruth, who cannot see or hear her. Hijinks ensue, eventually resulting in Ruth’s death. Charles must rely on the eccentric Madame Arcati to help the women pass on and to help him regain his sanity. The play looked at marriage, gender roles, and dealing with past mistakes, all with a supernatural twist.

December 2nd 2017
Emma McGlashen, The RC Players

The RC Players put on a production of “Proof”, a play dealing with complex themes of negotiating mental health, women advocating for recognition in STEM fields, and dealing with family pressures, all of which are themes college students are intimately familiar with in their own lives, especially on this campus. This play has the potential to help students process different ways of thinking about these themes by seeing them explored on stage.The show was entirely student-run, meaning that students democratically chose which production was put up, and then made all of the decisions about the production. They collaboratively made costumes, built the sets, ran lights, designed soundscapes, and determined what the overall "tone" of the show would be.

November 17th 2017
Molly Leonard, The RC Players

The RC players put on a production of "Seminar," a short play written by Theresa Rebeck. The play centers around five students in a playwriting seminar, and their interactions with each other and their professor. The show was entirely student-run, meaning that students democratically chose which production was put up, and then made all of the decisions about the production. They collaboratively made costumes, built the sets, ran lights, designed soundscapes, and determined what the overall "tone" of the show would be.

March 31st 2017
RC Players

RC Players,.staged a student run, student led cast and crew wonderful production of “Loveless in Lakewood.” AUDREY KELLAN is a brash, well-spoken but socially clueless young woman in her early twenties who has recently had to leave her university due to a dangerous incidents. She moves back in with her mother while attending some court-mandated therapy before she is allowed back at school. But when she is deemed still unfit to return to school, and her therapist warns her she might be making the same mistakes she made leading up to "the incident", Audrey leans into disaster. Will she find her way out of her own chaos, or will she remain nothing but Loveless in Lakewood?

March 17th 2017
RC Players

Marie Antoinette is a dramatic play that centers around the adult life of the title character. It explores the height of her power (and extravagance) and follows through her too-little-too-late attempts to acquiesce to the demands of the people, ultimately ending with her removal from the throne and subsequent imprisonment and execution. The piece, while borrowing its story from history, is not a direct period piece. The dialogue is largely contemporary, and the structure is far more introspective than biographical. RC Players encourages intersectional work between those that are in charge of the physical production of the play as well as those acting in it. Their team is entirely student run and is headed by 5 passionate women that seek to engage our audiences through this story.

December 2nd 2016
RC Players

RC Players staged a performance of the student-written play: Murder, by Chanel. The play focuses on a woman seeking to break out of society's role for her (an indolent trophy wife) and take action in her life, which unfortunately begins with the death of her husband. It goes to dark places and explores some darkness, while also having a cast of complex female characters with varying motivations, something absolutely essential for new theater audiences to see.

November 11th 2016
RC Players

RC Players stages a performance of the play Thinner Than Water by Melissa Ross. The show was produced, directed, and stage managed by students. The play explores complex themes related to death, coming of age, and relationships with family. The actors and crew employed various exercises to create a realistic depiction of the events and create an understanding of the characters' development.