At heart, the 1990 tragicomedy The Big Funk is less a theatrical production than a wrestling match, one between its playwright, John Patrick Shanley, and ... John Patrick Shanley.

In the science-fiction drama Omniscience - currently playing at Augustana College - playwright Tim Carlson imagines a not-too-distant U.S. future in which several Midwestern states are under Asian control, violent militia activity is commonplace, behavior is governmentally regulated through mood-leveling drugs, and surveillance systems monitor our every move.

Melissa McBain

(The following is the sidebar to the feature story "Love Letters: Melissa McBain Pays Tribute to Her Mother in New Ground Theatre's Going Back Naked.")

In addition to playwriting and performing, Melissa McBain also teaches in Augustana College's theatre department, and currently serves as coordinator and producer for the Quad City Playwrights' Festival, an annual evening of short plays by local writers, directed and acted by Augustana students. (This year's festival will take place at Augustana's Wallenberg Hall on Sunday, May 10.)

Ralph Troll. Photo by Marla Neuerburg, Augustana CollegeRalph Troll spent 40 years teaching biology at Augustana College, and he only told the story there twice.

The first time was in the late 1980s, when he was asked to speak to a German class, because he was from Germany.

"It was just kind of part of the story," he said last week.

And then in the 1990s, the college asked him to give a senior-recognition talk. "I'm a biologist," he said. "They didn't want to hear about anything like that.

"I decided: This is a good day to do this. ... That's really the first time I told the whole story."

In all, Troll - who is now 77 years old and an emeritus professor at Augustana - said that he's told about his family's experiences in Germany during World War II five times, which is five more times than his mother talked to her children about her stay in a concentration camp. He'll lecture twice next week, on Sunday at Davenport's Temple Emanuel and on Monday at Augustana College.

Jessica Benson, Sarah Potts, Molly Todd, Kate Heiman, and Ryan Mosher-Ohr in Five Women Wearing the Same DressFive Women Wearing the Same Dress, the Alan Ball comedy that opens the Riverbend Theatre Collective's 2009 season, takes place during a wedding reception, and the production is kind of like a wedding reception - or at least, the reception for a bride and groom you don't know all that well. It might begin awkwardly, but after a few drinks, dances, and interesting encounters with people you otherwise wouldn't have met, you discover that you're having an unexpectedly fantastic time, and when it's over, you may realize that you're not quite ready to leave.

image from Grand Canyon Adventure"I think in this country, and particularly for those of us living on a huge river, we take water completely for granted," says Kathryn Allen, chief organizer for the Quad Cities' annual Environmental Film Festival. "We turn on the tap, and it's always there, and it's always drinkable. We don't think about it."

Yet when it came time to schedule features for this year's festival, Allen states that she and fellow event planners were hard-pressed to not think about it.

Tim Mahoney

If you watch a lot of MTV, there's an excellent chance you've heard the music of Tim Mahoney, who will be performing at Augustana College on Friday, March 13.

He also has a video airing in Life Time Fitness locations in 18 states. And he has a partnership with Miller Genuine Draft.

That might sound like selling out, but the Minneapolis-based Mahoney said last week that it's simply a matter of survival for an independent musician.

"This is how you stay alive I think these days in the music business," he said. "It's that any-and-all-and-kind-of-outside-of-the-box theory. ... It takes so much more to get it to people."

Eliza Bockstahler and Liz Stigler in The Learned LadiesSet in 17th Century France, Augustana College's production of the Molière comedy The Learned Ladies takes place in the salon of a Paris manor, and among the first things you notice about Adam Parboosingh's scenic design are the stacks of books standing five feet high from the floor. It's actually impossible not to notice them, as the (prop) books have been painted in a variety of bright colors that make them resemble oversize, rectangular Skittles, or perhaps the reading material for Belle's library in Disney's Beauty & the Beast. They're certainly eye-catching, but there's no way anyone could mistake them for, you know, real books, and The Learned Ladies itself turns out to be a lot like them - deliberately artificial, kind of amusing, and, unfortunately, pretty much divorced from real-world experience.

Sean RyanThere is no disputing that Sean Ryan is inexperienced. He's a senior at Augustana College, and he nearly boasts that the songs on his debut album, Lonesome Driver Music, were dashed off and barely touched again.

"I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes writing a song before," he said in an interview - his first, he said - in September. He added that he only changed a handful of lines from initial composition to final recording.

Reader issue #681 Peter Kivisto offers this observation about Augustana College President Steven C. Bahls.

"Somebody'd have a new book, and the next thing you know, you'd have a little letter from him congratulating you," said Kivisto, the Richard Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana and the past chair of the faculty senate. "That's on the cheap, but it meant a lot to us."

It's an admittedly minor thing, but it speaks to Bahls' style, and style counts for a lot in leadership. The Rock Island liberal-arts college is not an autocracy, and the power of its president to create change largely rests with his ability to inspire and guide, particularly the faculty and the board of trustees.

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