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.
Preparations for Departure is a show like no other - unless, that is, you happened to catch last semester's performance of Macbeth. Like Macbeth, the show requires the audience to position themselves in relationship to the characters. The performance space has no clear stage, and while the action is often centered on one scene, the other characters were often spread throughout the space, still acting, allowing the audience to explore various characters and interactions at their leisure.
This similarity with Macbeth is not without reason; Matchbox Theater Company, the group behind Preparations, consists of Swarthmore '09 grads (Colin Aarons, Jessie Bear, Dan Perelstein, Sasha Shahidi, and Jackie Vitale) and Emma Ferguson (class of 2010), all of whom worked on or acted in Macbeth last May. (Full disclosure: This writer played in the MacBeth music ensemble.)
While it is never explicitly present - at least, this writer never found an explicit reference in the show or in the rich collection of papers and objects that decorated the space - the aesthetic of The Little Prince runs through Preparations for Departure as it tells the story of a real immigrant family, and expounds on that family in the realm of the maybe-magical.
Nine protesters, including one Swarthmore student and one student on an extended leave of absence, were arrested last Saturday, May 3, ending the four-day Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) encampment on Trotter Lawn. The seven others arrested were unaffiliated with the
The pro-Palestinian encampment constructed on Trotter Lawn on April 30 by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and demolished May 3, 2025, bears many similarities to the encampment the group constructed Spring 2024. However, one of the most striking differences between the
As the encampment continued at Swarthmore College, faculty-admin communication on next steps was minimal, with many faculty sharing that there was no communication other than President Smith’s messages to the entire campus. On Friday afternoon, more than 48 hours after the tents
