2023-2024 Season

Events

Bake-Off / 24-Hour Play 
Saturday, October 21, 2023, 7pm 
Forum, R. Thomas Flynn Campus Center 
Free and Open to the Public 

MCC students will meet in The Forum at 7 PM on Friday, October 20, to begin the process of creating a series of short plays from nothing. 24 hours later, those plays will be ready for an audience. Come laugh with us, cry with us, and help us celebrate the magic of co-curricular, interdisciplinary collaboration at its most immediate. 

Visiting Playwright, Garrett Zuercher 
Thursday, February 29, 2024, 7pm, Black Box Theater, Reading and Conversation 
Friday, March 1, 2024, 10am, Black Box Theater, Playwriting Workshop 
Friday, March 1, 2024, 12pm, 8-200, Playwriting Workshop 

Garrett Zuercher (he/him) is a profoundly Deaf theater and film artist and award-winning playwright who holds an MFA from Hunter College, class of 2022. Based in New York City, he serves as the founding artistic director of Deaf Broadway, for which he is currently producing an all-Deaf, all-ASL staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Company at Lincoln Center in summer of 2023, in which he will also star. Recently, he was awarded a residency commission from The Shed to create an original narrative piece about the lives and work of Deaf artists, which will be produced on the main stage in the summer of 2024. His most recent short film, “Flirting (With Possibilities),” continues to garner honors at film festivals around the world. Dedicated to bringing authentic Deaf voices to the mainstream, he continues to advocate for awareness and representation within the theatre and film industries. For more, please visit Garrett Zuercher's website (www.garrettzuercher.com)

Seventeenth Annual Sixth Act Student Playwriting Competition 
Thursday, May 9, 2024, 7pm, Black Box Theater 

This competition encourages MCC students to write plays for an audience, to provide MCC students a competitive venue for their scripts, to offer winning playwrights the opportunity to see their scripts performed as staged readings with an eye towards future play development, and to offer VaPA students the opportunity to participate in the new-play-development process. Three winning playwrights receive cash prizes. One winning playwright also will have his/her play submitted to a nationwide competition. Scripts will be accepted for consideration beginning in September. 

Special Projects

The Sixth Act will develop curriculum-support materials and events for VaPA’s 2023-2024 season and for theatre productions in the Rochester community in an effort to encourage faculty across MCC to teach these plays in their individual courses and to enrich this process for all involved. 

The Sixth Act also will continue to develop Drama on Demand, now as a Video Library. This popular program now features web-based, filmed versions of VaPA students performing scenes from published plays so these scenes can be used as co-curricular tools across campus. 

Finally, The Sixth Act will pilot a special, credit-bearing Honors sequence culminating in student-driven presentations showcased each year during MCC’s Scholars’ Day.