The Rice Players

03/28/2025

8pm tonight. 2pm and 8pm tomorrow.

03/28/2025

Join us this Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm, and Saturday at 8pm for the Solve It Squad, a fast-paced comedic imagining of what happens when our childhood heroes face adult problems and must come together one more time to solve the ultimate mystery! We've been hard at work and are so excited to invite you to join us on this wild ride!

09/02/2024

Have you ever wondered 💭 what would happen if a group of students decided to write📝, direct🎬, and perform 🤹 original plays, all within 24 hours⏰📆⏳? If only there was a way to find out…🧐🧐🧐The Rice Players 🎭 are putting on one of our most beloved events, Play in a Day, to answer this question. It’s literally one day! Likely the shortest theatre commitment you will ever encounter. Sign up to write✍️, direct👉, act🗣, or do tech💡 — form submissions are due Wednesday at 6pm. There will be a kickoff meeting on Friday at 6pm, writers will write into the night🌝, and then directors, actors, and technicians will work their magic🪄all day Saturday, performing 🎪 at 8pm. This is a great opportunity to discover (or rediscover) the joy and playfulness of theatre! 🤸‍♀️🤸🤸‍♂️

02/08/2022

The Rice Players are proud to announce the winners of our 2021 Playfest! In first place, “To Love a Lilac” by Jake Yount (Martel ‘22), will be put on as a full production in the fall of 2022. Our runner up, “The Patio Sitters” by Viola Hsia (Brown ‘25), will be performed as a staged reading later this semester. More info to come soon! We thank every extremely talented, creative playwright that submitted to us!

12/19/2020

Howdy Friends,

We hope you’re enjoying your holiday break! Here are some announcements from us!

New Coordinators!
We are so incredibly excited to be bringing Maddie Bell (Jones '24), Jerome Cerio (Wiess '24), Ben Smiley (Wiess '24), and McKenna Tanner (Hanszen '24) on to our coordinating team! They’re absolutely incredible, and we’re excited to work with them to support the theater community. Thank you also to everyone else who applied. If you’re interested in being a Rice Players coord, we’ll take applications again next fall.

PlayFest!
The absolutely amazing winner of our Fall 2020 PlayFest is The Invention of Fireworks by Cooper Valentine, Duncan ’23. We’re so excited to be producing a virtual staged reading of this show late this spring. This show is being produced by Bria Weisz and Lydia Wang. Auditions for this show will be during the spring semester. If you’re interested in writing plays, remember that we’ll be accepting plays for our next PlayFest in the fall, so start writing now!

Spring Show!
We are also incredibly excited to announce that this spring we will be doing an in-person, full production of The Laramie Project. While this show will be performed in-person, we also intend to make it available for streaming. We believe this show will be a powerful opportunity for students to tell a heart-wrenching and important story. This show is being produced by Caleb Dukes and Alejandra Wagnon. We are currently looking for directors and designers. If you’re interested please reach out to us at [email protected]. Auditions will be at the beginning of the spring semester.

Alum Listserv!
This semester we’ve created an alumni listserv! If you’re an alum and you’d like to occasionally hear about what we’re up to, please fill out this form to sign up: https://forms.gle/DchgbwsoGGXXR7wd9!

Play Club!
For winter break, the Rice Players are reviving our book/play club for current students. Every two weeks we’ll get together to read and then discuss a play! It’s a great opportunity to interact with people and read more plays! Anyone is welcome, and you don’t have to be otherwise involved with the Rice Players. We’ll have our first meetings the week of January 4th. To make sure you can access the play, chat with everyone, and hop on our Zoom play club meetings, join our Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/178868406738665!

Student Listserv and Discord!
If you’re a current student and you want to stay up to date with what we’re doing, join our listserv here: https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/riceplayers! Additionally, we have a discord where we host office hours and other communications that you can join by reaching out to us directly (message our account or email us at [email protected]).

Of course, we’ll also be coming at you with both some classic and new events next semester. We’re so excited about everything we’ve got in store so keep on eye on our listserv, Facebook, Insta, and discord to stay in the know (:

11/17/2020

There's been a lot of audition information recently and idk about you, but we've definitely been a little bit overwhelmed. We figured it'd be nice to put together a list of all of the upcoming auditions and shows for the next few weeks and next year!

MUSE - Rice Players - Auditions Nov 24th 7-9
MUSE is a student-written show about women from greek myths. We will be doing a virtual staged reading with auditions (entirely virtual) starting the 30th of November and performance on the 4th. Zoom link for auditions here: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/j/7687608556?pwd=Q2RpSmpEcjlYTHpzdmM4cFpJYzVWZz09

Play in a Day - Rice Players - January
Play in a day is our annual one-weekend play extravaganza! Over the course of 24-hours students will write, direct, and act in short plays! This is a great opportunity for a short term opportunity to try out theater. Entirely virtual.

TBA Rice Players Spring Show - Rice Players - Auditions in January
We will be putting on an in-person show! What show is TBA, but we're super excited. Auditions will be in January and the show will happen in the second half of the semester. This show will not conflict with New Voices

New Voices - VADA Department - Auditions Nov 30th and Dec 1st 7-9
New Voices will be a set of short scenes and monologues. This is the VADA department show for the semester so it's an actual class during the first half of the spring semester (although you don't have to sign up for the class if you don't want to). This is dual delivery with a virtual performance and will be relatively low commitment. Email [email protected] to sign up for auditions

Space Axed - Sid Rice Theater Committee - Auditions Nov 28th (sign up by the 25th)
Space Axed is a darkly funny tale about space tourists attempting to uncover a murderer! This show will happen during the spring semester and will be a mix of in person and virtual performance. Sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScRAwQe-gFEie0ZvdwpG34gSCQN4TrK9uaffjQG7eE3qyv-Mw/viewform

TBD College shows: Baker, McMurtry, Will Rice/Martel
We know these colleges are considering shows, so these may also be a possibility

Hope this helps you find theater opportunities for this or next semester!

11/02/2020

Hi Rice Players alums, parents, and friends!
The Rice Players have created a new Friends of the Rice Players listserv to connect with non-students: [email protected]! This listserv will send out (infrequent) announcements for shows and public events. To join, please click this link: https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/forp.

Additionally, we've realized that we don't have much information on who our alums are or how to connect with them. (We mostly have lists of names or rice emails, which aren't particularly helpful.) To help fix this, we're sending out this survey: https://forms.gle/yYW6BJy6PK2zBZg6A. Please fill it out and share it with all of your old theater friends so that we can keep in touch with all of our amazing alumni!

We hope you'll join us in our new endeavors toward stronger alumni and community relations!

Howdy! We've realized we don't have much information on who our alums are or how to connect with you. To fix this, we've made this form! We want to get to know you just a little bit and get the opportunity to let you know about our upcoming shows and reach out if we want to host events with alumni (...