Craig-Depken-II

Beatrice and Benedick dance from the shoulders up in their separate Zoom squares. Oedipus and Jocasta deal with their crumbling marriage, while Tiresias and Creon gossip in a breakout room. The Globe Theatre and the Theatre of Dionysus are the same Zoom stage.

Imagine a gothic thriller written with microscopic attention to detail. In the world of that story, fear is measured in millimeters of pupil dilation, and you can hear the forest hum. This is the world of “Radio Island.”

March 7 was the last time the Columbia men’s basketball team took the floor. That night, now over eight months ago, rival University of Pennsylvania thrashed the Lions in Philadelphia 85-65, wrapping up a devastating 6-24 campaign that saw Columbia finish at the very bottom of the Ancient Eight.

She imagines her mind like a hallway. Boxes line the floor, filled with all of the poetry and artwork she has ever studied. James Baldwin and W.B. Yeats are there, talking to her in David Hammons' blue light.

“My cries are wings: they pierce the cage.”

Over the course of one night, several brave and probably caffeinated students wrote, rehearsed, and recorded songs for their own nostalgic and hilarious parody of an iconic childhood film. The following evening was opening—and closing—night.

At 15 years old, Phanésia Pharel, BC ’21, marched into the lighting booth of her high school’s black box theater and locked the door behind her. By the time she stood up and walked out, she had written her first play. The following year, she was a published playwright.

After the arrival of head coach Al Bagnoli in 2015 and the subsequent success of the program, the Columbia football team began its 2017 season amid supporters’excitement and high expectations. With Bagnoli’s first recruiting class entering its sophomore year, fans anticipated that these young players were ready to make their first contributions to a program that had long known more failure than success. The plan for the season was to add nine sophomores to the starting lineup, putting the kind of pressure on them that college football players do not usually face until they are juniors or seniors.

The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” lyrics light up the bottom of the screen. Shadow puppets pack a suitcase. Johann Strauss takes over for Vera Lynn in a Doctor Strangelove-inspired closing montage. Sprawled across YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom, this is interdisciplinary theater at its most inventive.