Current Season

Bake-Off / 24-Hour Play 
Saturday, September 28, 2024, 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, September 27, 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, Seayoung Yim
Thursday, April 3, 2025, 7pm, Black Box Theater, Reading and Conversation
Friday, April 4, 2025, 10am, Black Box Theater, Interdisciplinary Theatre Workshop
Friday, April 4, 2025, 12pm, 8-200, Playwriting Workshop

Seayoung Yim is a playwright and educator from Seattle. Her play, Jar of Fat, published by Yale University Press, was the 2022 winner of the Yale Drama Series Prize. Honors include: Woolly Mammoth X Black List Playwriting Commission, Powers Playwriting Fellowship - Old Globe, 2023 Kilroys Web, Hedgebrook residency, Sewanee Writers’ Conference fellowship, Stephen Sondheim Graduate fellowship, finalist - 2024 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, second place - Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award (KCACTF). Her work has been supported by Ma-Yi Writer’s Lab, Clubbed Thumb, Annex Theater, Cafe Nordo, and others. MFA: Brown University. more, please visit Seayoung Yim's website (www.seayoungyim.com). 

Eighteenth Annual Sixth Act Student Playwriting Competition 
Thursday, May 8, 2025, 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.

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.