Dakotta Hagar to perform in "Freshwater" at Culver-Stockton College

2013 Sep 17

British wit sparkles through debates about art, truth and the pleasures of a day at the beach, as the Culver-Stockton College Theatre Department brings a rediscovered Virginia Woolf drawing room farce to Mabee Little Theatre in the C-SC Performing Arts Center. "Freshwater," Woolf's only dramatic work, is directed by Dr. Ron Zank, assistant professor of theatre at Culver-Stockton.

Dakotta Hagar, a sophomore music education major from Edina, Mo., has been cast as James, the bootboy.

Though Woolf is known for innovative novels and short stories, "Freshwater" lampoons the artistic community of her great-aunt's Victorian generation. Performed only once for friends in 1935, "Freshwater" went unpublished until 1976, and received its first professional New York production in 2009. Drawing from the foibles of her own Bloomsbury artistic circle, Woolf's characters lovingly debate the desire to live a high-minded, creative existence against the more earthy impulses for swimming, romantic love or eating a good steak. Artists, sailors, animals, servants and royalty come together in this whirlwind farce. While Tennyson reads his poetry, pictures are taken, secrets revealed, facts discovered in the raspberries and the important questions are asked: Who is Lydia? What is truth? And will the coffins arrive in time?

Freshwater" was presented by the Culver-Stockton College Division of Fine Arts and is part of the college's Academic and Cultural Affairs programming.