PCT Mission Statement

Peace College Theatre strives to empower women in the arts and prepare students for careers in the arts and other disciplines by:

• Providing the student the opportunity to study and experience theatre in its highest artistic form,
• Producing performances of a wide range of classic plays and musicals from all periods of history in new and innovative ways that reflect the latest and best in theatre practice and theory,
• Premiering new works, including adaptations of literature, both by professional playwrights and student writers,
• Offering innovative classes that train students in the wide array of collaborative skills and knowledge which make up the work of theatre,
• Supporting the goals of the liberal arts education that encourage academic debate and enhance the intellectual climate of the campus and community,
• Creating mentoring opportunities for students to work alongside professional actors, directors, designer, playwrights, costumers and other artists across the theatre discipline and other creative arts,
• Constructing the highest possible quality sets, costumes, props, lighting and other production elements,
• Giving women the chance to perform roles typically unavailable to them in other settings,
• Encouraging students to travel to theatrical performances in New York, London, and Las Vegas
• And advising students carefully and attentively with regard to curriculum and career opportunities through regular counsel, mentoring, and assessment.

Highlights and Accomplishments

• Presented the first American production of Polly Teale’s adaptation of Jane Eyre only two weeks after the Shared Experience from London played the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Teale taught a master class at Peace during her company’s residence in NY.
• Received Mary Duke Biddle grant to bring nationally renowned playwright and actor Eddie Levi Lee to campus to play the title role in King Lear in 2006.
• PCT has also been awarded two grants to write new plays by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. The first project resulted in Dreaming in Color written by students and alumnae in conjunction with playwright Barbara Lebow. The second grant subsidized the adaptation for the stage of Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son by Dickens’ scholar Elliot Engel. Building on the support of the Foundation, PCT students have written, directed and produced five original and adapted plays since 1999. The plays are Better Late Than Ever, On the Other Side, Far and True, and Tartuffe, the Rock Musical.
• Student Kristal DeSantis wrote and starred in her own Las Vegas adaptation of The Misanthrope at PCT in 2008.
• Students have gone on to New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Wilmington and other cities to pursue professional careers in theatre, film and television. PCT alums have also gone on to study at schools like The Juilliard School, Harvard, American Academy of Dramatic Art and Virginia Commonwealth.
• An Inspector Calls chosen as one of Top Ten Productions for 2005 by Raleigh “News and Observer.”
• Cat On A Hot Tin Roof chosen for Honorable Mention for top productions of 2005 by “News and Observer.”
• Suddenly Last Summer chosen one of top 8 (out of 149 productions) for 2005 by “Independent Weekly.”
• Eye of God named to the N&O’s Top Ten List for 2004 (the only college production so honored).
• Peace alumna Emily Feimster is now a member of the Groundlings in Los Angeles now in year three and is also working as entertainment journalist.
• Peace students Kathryn Fuller and Meghan Beeler Pridemore were named Best Comic Actress by Robert’s Reviews in consecutive years.
• Christian Sineath moved to NY and studied theatre at AADA and is now studying voice with Ashley Putnam as a student at the Manhattan School of Music.
• Twelfth Night, set in Louisiana featuring an original score by Glenn Mehrbach, was the only college production chosen for the Raleigh News and Observer’s Top Ten List for 2001.
• The 1999 PCT production of Time and the Conways was one of only two licensed productions in the United States given since Stephen Daldry’s 1993 landmark production of An Inspector Calls.
• Henson Muppeteer Rickey Boyd came to campus to teach puppetry arts and to build a life size dolphin for the PCT production of Let Me Hear You Whisper.
• A Shayna Maidel was nominated for five Spectator Magazine awards in 2000 and was named to the year’s Top Ten List.
• Visiting scholars and artists to visit PCT (most as residents) over the years include Barbara Lebow, Gizella Abramson, Eddie Levi Lee, Tom Key, Lily Knight, Polly Teale, Emily Procter, Rickey Boyd, Michael Mattison, Randy Noojin, Kelly Hilliard, Pem Price-Medlin, Jeffery West, S. Quincy Beard, and Christine Morris.
• Produced all female productions of The Misanthrope,The Tempest, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing (set in Hawaii 1945, playing off the notion of what women had to give up in terms of authority and power when the war was over and what the word “honor” really means), and Twelfth Night.

Our Donors

Peace thanks its generous donors. We depend upon their support.

J. Truett and Margaret Gannon
Susan Watkins Davis
Annette Marsland
Valerie Hall
Jordan Smith
Michael Magoon
Randy Bass
Mary Duke Biddle Foundation
Kenny and Monique Gannon
Nancy Raynor
Joe and Leslie Wolf
Ann Bingham
Bes Spangler
Meg Revelle
Adair Robertson
Roger and Gale Ashby
Angela Kirkley
David McLennan
Kelley Mills
Sue Fisher