College of DuPage College Theater opens 'Scenes From An Execution' Feb. 27

College of DuPage College Theater presents Howard Baker's "Scenes from an Execution" on Thursday, Feb. 27, to Sunday, March 15. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. in the McAninch Arts Center's Studio Theatre on the Glen Ellyn campus, 425 Fawell Blvd.

The shows director, COD Theater professor Amelia Barrett, said the decision to produce "Scenes from an Execution" for the College Theater season was in part inspired by "Frida Kahlo 2020," an exhibition of the largest private collection of original Kahlo artwork, coming this summer to the college's Cleve Carney Museum of Art at the McAninch Arts Center.

"We wished to explore and encourage our students to investigate the nature of art and artist," she said. "The Frida exhibit has opened up so many ideas for our theater programming this year."

Set in the 16th century, Galactia is commissioned to paint a canvas, the size of two modern day school buses, representing the triumph of the Holy League over the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Lepanto. Instead of commemorating the event, the artist responds with a work that denounces the carnage of war. Her self-destructive obsession with realism and her own idea of the truth threatens her personal relationships, her safety and her autonomy.

"The work deals with large ideas about the role of the artist in regard to the patron," Barrett said. "It's about the impact of art, about the competitive nature of artists' ambition and talent, about lust and love, about violence, about power, and above all else, about communicating a point of view through art."

Tickets are $16, $14 for students and seniors.

Support is made possible by a generous gift from the College of DuPage Foundation's Dr. Donald and Helen (Gum) Westlake Fund for Student Productions.

For more information, call the MAC Box Office at (630) 942-4000 or visit www.atthemac.org.

Learn more about College Theater at College of DuPage at www.atthemac.org/college-theater/.