The Augsburg College Theatre Department opens its season on Nov. 5 with Molière’s comedy, The Learned Ladies. In this play, a family is thrown into disarray when the mother becomes fixated on an intellectual charlatan. The play evolves into a hilarious portrayal of the intellectual perversions sometimes seen in academia (and elsewhere) when the quest for knowledge is replaced by pseudo-intellectuality, pretention, inflated self-importance, and power mongering.
Sarah Witte, a junior theatre major, plays Armande, one of the learned ladies. The ladies, Witte says, are very strong characters—”…so strong that they rub it in other people’s faces.” Certainly intellectual superiority, on the part of the ladies as well as other characters, is a theme in the play. Continue reading “The Learned Ladies”