Classes & Workshops

SpringFEST Performances offer actors the opportunity to step out of the box or to learn on the boards through a short but intense rehearsal period and public performances in our Studio Theater, where the audience is up close and personal.

V-Day Hartnell College 2010
Our 5th annual campaign benefiting organizations
working against violence to women and girls

Be part of our presentations of Eve Ensler’s
The Vagina Monologues
Performances scheduled: February 20, 24, & 28, 2010

and

Any One of Us: Words from Prison
Performances scheduled: February 17, 21 & 27, 2010

We plan to present this popular and vital campaign in our Main Stage theater.
General admission of $15 will benefit the Monterey County Rape Crisis Center and the New Start Recovery Home for Women.

A new project reading written by Harvey Landa for the AAUW
(American Association of University Women)
Saturday, March 13 , 2010
(with additional public performances for Women’s History Month)

Known both as "Big Alma" (she was 6 feet tall) and "The Great Grandmother of San Francisco", Alma was a wealthy socialite and philanthropist who, among her many accomplishments, persuaded her first husband, sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels to donate the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to the city of San Francisco, California. Because he was head of the Spreckels Sugar Company, Alma often referred to her husband as her "sugar daddy".

She was born the fifth of six children of Viggo and Mathilde de Bretteville, two Danish immigrants. At age 14, Alma quit school to work full-time for the family business. Meanwhile, she had developed a love of art and enrolled in the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art to study painting. While there, she earned money by being a nude model. Now flush with cash, she became popular around town, and found herself intimately involved with a miner named Charlie Anderson. After their relationship deteriorated, she gained a bit of notoriety for having successfully sued him for "personal defloweration"!

March 20 & 21, 2010
An original work by the acting ensemble
Directed by Jeff McGrath

This is a third installment of an annual project. We are looking for individuals to share personal stories to create a series of monologues. Through the development process students gain not only an advancement of studio acting skills, but a better understanding of each other and our communities.
Performs March 20 & 21

The first presentation of Jeff McGrath’s SpringFEST project, Can I Get a Witness, originated as an investigation of social themes that were an integral part of TWS’2008 production of The Laramie Project. The acting ensemble was asked to write about personal encounters with isolation, prejudice or fear and to share them with the others. They were then challenged to truthfully embody the story of another person for an audience.

Can I Get A Witness (CIGAW) asks its participants to honor each other’s experiences, and then to help give each story voice through theatrical form. The process of gathering and telling these stories is a highly challenging and personal one, but it gives courage to the teller by breaking the silence. It has been written that theatre formed as a result of human tendency for storytelling. In that storytelling, the audience is moved together through the common experience, and while interpretation of that experience can vary with each individual, it is the journey taken while in a common place that bonds communities.

It is in that spirit that annual projects like Can I Get a Witness will continue to have a prominent place in SpringFEST, and in our designs for additional presentations by Hartnell students. We will continue to seek little-known or untold stories that, while individual and personal, tell universal human truths.

April 20-30, 2010 The Pearl will be presented as student matinees for young audiences to experience John Steinbeck’s classic tale that explores the secrets of man’s nature and the evils of greed and temptation. Performances are scheduled for April 20–30 and include weekday performances for school groups. Double casting possible to accommodate availability conflicts.

Enroll now at Hartnell Admissions & Records
Information: (831) 755-6987

For more information about classes, email Melissa Chin-Parker