Leading Lights of Theater to Attend College Festival

When the 1993 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival gets underway Sunday in Washington, six top college productions will be presented and a bevy of theater luminaries will be on hand to celebrate the festival’s 25th anniversary.

Roger L. Stevens, the founding chairman of Kennedy Center who started the festival in 1969, will open the gathering with actors Jason Robards Jr. and Uta Hagen in attendance, as well as playwright Robert Schenkkan, who won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for “The Kentucky Cycle.”

Also participating in the festival, which runs through April 27, will be Broadway costume designer Patricia Zipprodt, a three-time Tony Award winner (“Cabaret,” “Sweet Charity” and “Flora, the Red Menace”); set designer Ming Cho Lee, another Tony winner (“K-2”); actor Al Freeman (“Malcolm X”); and composer-arranger Luther Henderson (“Jelly’s Last Jam”), among others.

The college shows chosen for the festival were judged the best at eight regional competitions held nationwide in January and February. They are:

* “All That He Was” by Larry Johnson and Cindy O’Connor (Cal State Fullerton), winner of the National Student Playwriting Award.

* “Fences” by August Wilson (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va.).

* “The Manager” by Darrin Shaughnessy (Cal State Fullerton), winner of the National Short Play Award.

* “Indulgences in the Louisville Harem” by John Orlock (Cal State Fresno).

* “The Voice of the Prairie” by John Olive (Emporia State University, Emporia, Kan.).

* “Cloud 9” by Caryl Churchill (Oakland University, Rochester, Minn.).

A seventh production from Spain--”Mistaken Confidences” by Pierre Marivaux--also will be presented in an exchange program with the Barcelona-based Institut del Teatre. In return, “All That He Was” has been invited to Barcelona, where it will be staged June 1 and 2. (A separate, professionally cast version, starring Gary Imhoff, is already in rehearsal in Los Angeles. It is scheduled to open May 14 at the Tamarind Theatre for a six-week run.)

Over the years the Kennedy Center festival has hosted productions from hundreds of colleges, large and small. They have ranged from Ivy League schools (Brown, Dartmouth and Yale) to major public universities (UCLA, Louisiana State and Penn State) to little-known private schools (St. Michael’s College in Winooski, Vt., and Hope College in Holland, Mich.).

Past winners of the festival’s National Student Playwriting Award include Lee Blessing, who is best known for “A Walk in the Woods”; Jim Leonard, who won for “The Diviners,” which went on to widespread acclaim; and Sean Clark, who is chief story editor of the CBS-TV series “Evening Shade.”