The College of Western Idaho (CWI) Visiting Artist Series is proud to welcome the Opal Theatre Company to campus Wednesday, Nov. 14. Josh Rippy, Adjunct Faculty of Theatre Arts at the College, will be bringing his theatre company to the Nampa Campus Academic Building for a dramatic reading of “The Minotaur” from 6 – 8 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.
The Minotaur is a modern update of the classic Greek myth. Ariadne is an unhappy teenager who lives in a deeply dysfunctional home. Her father, Minos, is the despot ruler of Crete who loathes his wife for falling in love with a bull (a divine punishment by Poseidon for the failure of Minos to sacrifice the bull to honor him) and giving birth to a monster. Her mother despises anything else that came from her womb, meaning Ariadne. As a result, Ariadne is so lonely that she frequently visits the prison maze beneath the castle to talk and play Connect Four with her half-brother, a man with the head of a bull.
Playwright Ziegler dances with several interesting intellectual questions: Is love the key to happiness, or is happiness overrated? Are men much different from beasts? Most importantly, are our lives preordained by fate or do we have free will that allows us to choose our futures?
CWI’s Visiting Artist Series is made possible thanks to a grant from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, which is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.