The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival is a national organization over 40 years old that is dedicated to the promotion of excellence in college and university theatre. Lycoming College participates as a member of Region II, which includes the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, southwestern New York., northern Virginia, and Washington, DC.

All of our Welch Theatre shows are entered each year as Associate productions, which means that a KCACTF Respondent comes to see each production and offers verbal feedback to the company following a performance. Two student actors are selected from each production to compete in the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship competition, and student stage managers and designers also have opportunities to compete for scholarships in their fields.

Every year, each of the country’s eight regions hosts a Regional Festival—five days filled with fully mounted performances of one-act and full-length plays, workshops, staged readings, design displays, the Tech Olympics, and a host of other events. In recent years, Lycoming faculty and students have traveled each January to the Region II Festival, which has been held in such cities as Pittsburgh, PA, New Paltz, NY, College Park, MD, and Allentown, PA. There our actors have auditioned for the Irene Ryan Scholarship, stage managers have presented their promptbooks, designers have displayed their work, and in every case students received valuable feedback by theatre professionals from around the region and the country.

Theatre Department faculty have also actively participated in the Region II Festival as judges and respondents for the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship competition, as well as workshop leaders.

In 2007, a team of Theatre Department students won the Tech Olympics, a hard-fought competition testing a variety of technical skills, from identifying tools to hanging and focusing a lighting instrument. We then had the honor of organizing and hosting the Tech Olympics at the 2008 Region II Festival.

The Theatre Department’s participation in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival is indicative of our commitment to providing students with a gamut of theatre experiences—through coursework, our rigorous production program, and by exposure to theatre beyond the Lycoming College campus.