Faculty, students, and alumni from the Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department are traveling to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland — the world’s largest annual arts festival — with the comedy Our Christian Nation, a satirical look at what the U.S. would look like if the extreme Christian Right got everything they wanted. As the show’s author, Columbia College Theatre Department teacher Joe Janes, puts it: “a world where children only get homeschool lessons with religious revisions, privatization is rampant, being poor is a crime, insurance is only for those who can afford it, women have very few rights, and conversion therapy camps are as normal as the Boy Scouts.”
Joe Janes
Janes, an Emmy Award-winning writer who teaches comedy writing and improvisation in the Columbia College Theatre Department’s nationally pace-setting BA Program in Comedy Writing and Performance, also teaches at The Second City comedy theatre and training center, Columbia College’s partner institution on the Comedy Writing and Performance BA program.
Andrea J. Dymond
The show is directed by Andrea J. Dymond, a Columbia College Theatre Department Theatre Directing program faculty member and freelance director. For information on the Edinburgh performances, click here.
Our Christian Nation will be presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe August 4-12. As a warmup, the show will be performed at two Chicago comedy venues the weekend of July 21 and 22. On Friday, July 21, the show plays at 7:30 PM at the MCL Comedy Theatre, 3110 N Sheffield, and on Saturday, July 22, there’s a 10:30 PM performance at the Playground Theatre, 3209 N. Halsted. (Both theatres are located in the Belmont Theatre District in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood.) Tickets for both performances are $10. For tickets, call 773-531-1792.
The show’s cast includes Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department alum Lauren Fisher ’05, a graduate of the Theatre Department’s BA Program in Acting. Also in the cast are Columbia College Chicago students Bethany Schmieder, Nicholas Polk, Adam Ston, and Aidan O’Connor, as well as faculty members Janes and Dymond.
As reported previously in this blog, Our Christian Nation premiered earlier this year at the Cornservatory in Chicago.
