Acclaimed playwright Arlene Hutton, the pen name of actor/director Beth Lincks, was inspired to write As It is in Heaven after visiting the Pleasant Hill Shaker village in Harrodsburg, KY.  Pleasant Hill was occupied by Shakers for more than a century, before it was abandoned in 1927 due to the inability of the sect to attract new believers. As It is in Heaven premiered at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, and has been performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and off-Broadway. UNCSA’s production of As It is in Heaven will feature Drama college juniors and seniors (members of Studios III & IV).

Guest director Ashley Gates Jansen is a graduate of the UNCSA School of Drama’s Directing program. She has worked at the Old Globe in San Diego, Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland and San Francisco's Encore Theatre. She has directed a number of productions across the country, as well as several productions at UNCSA including The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1998), Three Tall Women (2002), Marion Bridge (2004), and After Easter (2005).

The University of North Carolina School of the Arts is the first state-supported, residential school of its kind in the nation. Established as the North Carolina School of the Arts by the N.C. General Assembly in 1963, UNCSA opened in Winston-Salem (“The City of Arts and Innovation”) in 1965 and became part of the University of North Carolina system in 1972. More than 1,100 students from high school through graduate school train for careers in the arts in five professional schools: Dance, Design and Production (including a Visual Arts Program), Drama, Filmmaking, and Music. UNCSA is the state’s only public arts conservatory, dedicated entirely to the professional training of talented students in the performing, visual and moving image arts. For more information, visit www.uncsa.edu.        

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