Events & Activities

Urbana – Love and loss are themes explored in Eurydice, a modern retelling of the ancient myth of Orpheus, to be performed by Urbana High School students March 8 and 9.

“I was really drawn to the poetic language of this play,” said the director, Saskia Bakker, a UHS senior with plans to pursue a Theatre Direction major in college. “There’s also a suspension of disbelief involved, exploring ‘What is reality,’ and ‘How far can we push that edge for the audience?’”

Symbolic themes of water, string, and letters in envelopes are woven throughout the production, which features a set that Bakker said is more “dreamlike and ethereal” than what people typically associate with the underworld, or hell. “The way death is presented in the play is different—the bad thing about death isn’t dying, it’s forgetting. The story looks at what you know, what you’ve forgotten, and how you can remember,” Bakker said. The play is being performed and produced by students in the UHS Acting Class, which was offered for the first time this semester. Tim Broeker, the Director of Theatre and an English teacher at UHS, said the class offers an opportunity to do different types of theatre.

Situational humor, verbal word play, and memorable characters will entertain audiences in Urbana High School’s Cobb Auditorium this week, when students present Blithe Spirit. The show opens Wednesday, February 14, and runs through Sunday, February 18.

“Blithe Spirit is a love story, but a cynical one,” said the show’s director Sara Jones. “It’s sort of an anti-love love story. I really like that it offers an unconventional look at love, while being very funny. It seems appropriate, in an ironic way, that it’s opening on Valentine’s Day.”

The comic play is about a novelist who invites an eccentric medium and clairvoyant to a dinner party at his house, in hopes of gathering material for his next book. The novelist gets much more than he bargained for when the séance conducted by the medium ultimately beckons the ghost of his first wife into the home he now shares with his second wife.

SAVE THE DATE!

The 13th annual Boneyard Creek Community Day event is happening on Saturday, April 7, 2018. Boneyard Creek Community Day is a way to celebrate and protect our local waterways through cleanup and educational activities.  Individuals of all ages can participate with work sites varying from projects in the creek to those more suitable for children.

Urbana will host one of the event's remote clean-up sites at Boneyard Creek Crossing at Griggs and Race Streets.   Cleanup begins at 9 a.m. and ends at noon. After the clean-up activities, lunch will be served at Scott Park in Champaign, where there will also be music and interactive learning displays.

All City administrative offices are closed to observe the holiday.