THE SEEING PLACE at USC's Longstreet Theatre

Name: THE SEEING PLACE at USC's Longstreet Theatre
Start: 2025-10-01T19:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-10-01T21:30:00-04:00
Location: 1300 Greene St., Columbia, SC, United States, South Carolina 29208

Schedule

Wed Oct 01 2025 at 07:30 pm to 09:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

1300 Greene St., Columbia, SC, United States, South Carolina 29208 | Columbia, SC

The University of SC Department of Theatre and Dance will begin its 2025-2026 season with the ghostly new play "The Seeing Place," September 26 through October 5 at Longstreet Theatre.
Show times are 7:30pm Wednesday through Saturday, with additional 3pm performances on Sunday, September 28 and Sunday, October 5. Admission is $15 for students, $20 for USC faculty/staff, military, and seniors 60+, and $22 for the public. Tickets may be purchased online at sc.universitytickets.com. Longstreet Theatre is located at 1300 Greene St. Entry to the theatre is through the rear breezeway off Sumter St. "The Seeing Place" contains language that may not be appropriate for young audiences.
This original play by USC Theatre Assistant Professor Lauren Wilson is a ghost story inspired by the “haunted” reputation of our most notable performance venue. In the face of budget cuts and theatre closures, directing student Sam and their cast sneak into the now shuttered and abandoned Longstreet Theatre, a building once used as a Civil War hospital and morgue, to stage a renegade production of Hamlet. Undaunted by the theater’s flickering lights and creeping mold, director and cast throw themselves into the project – that is, until spirits of the building’s past begin to stir. By turns funny, frightening, and poignant, "The Seeing Place" is an homage to the theatre and its artists, who carry compassion forward like a flickering spark through a world of danger and sorrow.
In addition to her teaching career, Wilson is a published playwright whose comedies "Chemical Imbalance" and "The Golden State" are available through Dramatists Play Service, one of the world’s leading theatrical publishing agencies. Her play "Wedding Duet" was published in the 2007 Vintage anthology "Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays."
My published plays are often dark comedies,” Wilson says. “I was inspired by the idea of writing a ghost play that would be very scary at moments while also speaking to our common predicament as theatre makers – that we all love an art form which is everywhere endangered and difficult to sustain.”
The hair-raising content is less "Friday the 13th" style horror, she says, but closer to the ghost plays of non-Western theatre traditions. “In many other cultures, there’s a sense of spirits living among us. We tend to think of ghosts as some kind of pagan holdover from a more primitive mindset when, in fact, most of the world understands there’s a porous membrane between the living and the dead.”
Wilson describes the team of fictional students who break into the boarded-up old theatre as like a band of “guerilla” theatre makers, whose motivation to stage Hamlet there is informed by their sense of social conscience. “It’s an act of civil disobedience,” Wilson explains, “with echoes of Hamlet’s predicament. Spurred on by the ghost of his father, Hamlet stages his ‘play within the play’ to expose his father’s murderer. Likewise, the students in the play are speaking out against the state of their world through an act of theatre.”
She’s quick to emphasize that the derelict Longstreet Theatre of "The Seeing Place" is a greatly exaggerated version of the actual building. “The technical and production staff here work constantly and devotedly to keep Longstreet Theatre in top running order for our students and audiences,” she says. “The underlying motive for this play was a love and appreciation for this beautiful old theatre and for the people who keep it alive.”
Wilson and theatre instructor Marybeth Gorman Craig are co-directing the production, which features a cast of sixteen undergraduate students, including Keyontaye Allison, Kayla Barron, Grayson Bonner, Isnerys Carrasquillo, Josh Cook, Ben Doub, Mel Driggers, Gracen Greenburg, Jacob Groetsch, Kaeden Harris, Lakayla Henryhand, Rodney Payden, Fernand Quintero, Aza Nyberg, Luke Shelton and Rachel Vanek. Transforming the Longstreet stage into a dark and dilapidated state are graduate designers Egba Evwibovwe (scenic) and Garreth Hayward (lighting), with faculty members Kristy Hall creating costumes (for both the living and the dead) and John Kiselica building an appropriately eerie soundscape.
“From the moment you enter the theatre, we want you to be in a transformed world,” Wilson says. “This is the world of ghosts and we’re just entering into it.”
For more information on "The Seeing Place" or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, contact Kevin Bush by phone at 803-777-9353 or via email at [email protected].