The beginning of the theater program at Grand Rapids Community College dates back to 1967. A student in Language Arts instructor Walt Lockwood's Creative Writing class, Joe Dionne, wrote an absurdist one-act play called, A Breakfast of Oranges and Blue Shade. A group of students approached Fred Sebulske, then in his first year of teaching at the college, to help bring the play to a stage. With Fred's direction, the play was performed for one night only at St. Cecilia Music Center. Students involved in this first production and others convinced Sebulske and associate instructor Karin Orr to continue producing plays as an extra-curricular activity, and the language arts division was persuaded to add a performance course to the speech curriculum: Introduction to Acting. For several years, this single acting course and a one play per semester comprised the theater program at GRCC.
Over the decades, the theater program added additional performances courses, technical theater courses, dance courses, a script analysis class and directing class.
In 1997, the original Spectrum Theater at 110 Crescent NE was torn down, and the new Spectrum Theater opened on 160 Fountain NE. It is home to productions from GRCC Players, as well as Actors’ Theatre and Jewish Theatre Grand Rapids.
Currently, the Theater program is led by Tom Kaechele, with Jonathan Wheeler as Theater Manager, and Cole Szeszulski as Technical Director.
Among the plays produced during its 6-decade history are: JB, Our Town, Playboy of the Western World, The Glass Menagerie, Spoon River Anthology, The Birthday Party, A Doll's House, The Rimers of Eldritch, God's Country, Fires in the Mirror, Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Seagull, The Foreigner, The Elephant Man, The Lion in Winter, Crimes of the Heart, Noises Off, and The Dining Room. More recent productions include Detroit ’67, Anton in Show Business, She Kills Monsters, Welcome to Arroyo’s, Eurydice, The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, Kill Move Paradise, and John Proctor is the Villain. The Theater program is focused on selecting scripts that reflect the values of the college and offer challenging roles to the students.
A growing number of GRCC theater alumni can be found working in every aspect of the theater industry across the country, including on Broadway.