Mr. Don Correll

The Foreigner, brilliantly written by Larry Shue and smartly staged by LCC's Center Stage director Donald Correll, entertains us with such questions.
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Don Correll's well-seasoned direction drives this mostly dialogue-driven play to uproarious heights.
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Both Don Correll's lighting and set design are excellent; the shifts from therapists' offices to apartment to restaurant are seamless.Mr. Correll has more than a little of the magician's touch when it comes conjuring up the magic of theatre.

Don Correll was the director.He and Leslie Slape shared authorship.
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So went the e-mail note from my longtime friend, Don Correll, head of the theater department at Lower Columbia College in Longview since 1976.
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Don chose it at the same moment that he chose the title - "The Time-Travelers Story Guide to Planet Earth."It came to him in a flash, he told me.Now all our stories had to deal with the Earth; we soon refined it to "a sense of mystery and magic and wonder about the Earth and our relationship to it."

Storytellers are familiar with the ordeal of reading and rejecting stacks of stories before finding the perfect gem.Well, this was worse.Not only did I have to find stories that personally appealed to me, but Don had to like them, they had to fit into what turned out to be a surprisingly troublesome theme, and, above all, be "playable."That means that they had to transfer easily from individual to group performance, and conjure up images in Don's mind.As he envisioned it, the whole play was built of images - primordial soup, snow blown by the wind, flowers growing, trees falling down - all formed by the actors' bodies.

He also wanted tales from every corner of the Earth, but that proved difficult.Tales from certain cultures simply worked better than others.

As I began to write, I found that all those years of storytelling had blessed me with an ear for dialogue.Nevertheless, my early scripts were way too complicated and took forever to write.But as we approached our deadline I was just whipping them out, several a day.Don was too.
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Before auditions, we did two open readings, which was thrilling for Don and me.

Don CorrellAdvisor:dcorrell@lcc.ctc.edu

About 55 local folks will perform in 29 acts directed by Don Correll, the drama instructor at Lower Columbia College, and opera instructor Sue Hinshaw.

"It is about honor, not doing what is convenient, not following the crowd, doing what is right," said Don Correll, director of Lower Columbia College's Center Stage.

The play, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lanford in 1998, opened Wednesday at LCC.

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The play "strangely resonates more now," Correll said, with Dublin mirroring Longview's dependence on a handful of industrial giants like Longview Aluminum, and the power of those employers over the town.

This is not a play that can be viewed through "rose-colored glasses," Laursen and Painton said.

"This show demands sincerity," Laursen said."It makes people think."

Background music for the LCC production includes country and bluegrass, classical, folk, rock, a rendition of "Let the Sunshine In" and even John Phillip Sousa's resounding "Stars and Stripes Forever."

The head of LCC's drama department, Don Correll, could not be reached for comment.

Area high schools and theater groups, as well as LCC students, all use the fine arts center, which is located along 15th Avenue next to McDonald's.

Donald A. Correll, MM2 1959-62

Don Correll

577-2333