Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
As parents stumble into the Swarthmore bubble, students may find themselves overwhelmed by the wide array of options for the weekend (nevermind those wretched final papers that have decided to make themselves all too painfully apparent). However, given the number of activities for the weekend, there’s no reason why you can’t find something to do with your parents or even just to escape that paper and wander into the woods…
A semester’s worth of work has more than paid off for quite a lot of Swatties who get to present performances this weekend that they have been working long and hard on. The original play by Anna Belc ’07, “The Fishbowl,” is premiering tonight in the Frear Ensemble Theater at 8:00 pm (get there a little early to get a good seat) as well as Saturday and Sunday at the same time plus a showing at 3 pm on Saturday. The show follows a med student trying to work through grief over her brother’s death and understand what death really means to the living.
Also this weekend, Drama Board’s “Into the Woods,” is up Thursday through Saturday at 7:00 pm, with a noon showing on Sunday on LPAC mainstage. The playful retelling of several classic fairy tales has been lavishly staged and is a great choice to watch with parents. Sunday at 3:00 pm (in the amphitheater if the weather is good and Lang concert hall if the weather is not) is the Gamelan Semara Santi performance including a Topeng (Balinese masked dance) workshop.
If you’d like to show of the city of brotherly love, there are quite a few Swarthmore-related events taking Philly by storm. One is alum-laden experimental theater group Pig Iron’s latest play “Chekhov Lizardbrain” playing all weekend at the Latvian Society. It applies the “Three Brain” theory of Paul D. MacLean to Anton Chekhov.
Another is the Philadelphia Film Festival, running all week and including free events on Saturday related to film editing, screenwriting, filmmaking, and press conferences, as well as a winning screenplay (for a film set in Philadelphia) which will be read on Monday night. Of particular interest is “The Killer Within,” a documentary that’s gotten a good bit of on-campus attention for its retelling of the story of Bob Bechtel, a Swarthmore student in the fifties who killed his roommate one night. The film is being shown in the National Constitution Center at 4:30, tickets costing ten dollars.
Finally, this is also the weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival. Events include Swarthmore’s own Taiko group (and for those who missed the taiko performance earlier this week, the group will be performing at the Painted Bride tonight) as well as events for Sakura Sunday at Fairmount Park (you can take a shuttle to the park from Center City) such as windsock-making, tea ceremonies, kite flying, calligraphy, drumming, dancing, martial arts, origami, food, and ikebana demonstrations.