While most courses offered in the theater department are based on training and technique — acting, stage management, play analysis — Professor Derek Goldman’s new class blends method with real, practical and more importantly, professional experience.

While most people, and most incoming Joe and Jane Hoyas, associate Washington with Congress, the White House and the Capitol, Washington is just as much a city of the arts as it is a city of politics. The District contains world-class museums and galleries, many with renowned and famous paintings, drawings and sculptures.

For Karen Berman, adjunct assistant professor in theater and performance studies and artistic adviser to student theater groups, using advocacy is nothing new — she’s been advocating the importance of theater for the past three years as president of the Association for Theater in Higher Education.

Mask and Bauble’s latest show, the Tony Award-winning musical “Cabaret,” is a tough undertaking.

For Jacquey Anne Julio (COL ’10), being a performance coordinator for Club Filipino combines both of her origins: her Filipino heritage and the spectacle of her hometown of Northern Las Vegas, Nev. Currently choreographing three dances for the club’s annual Filipino Cultural Night, or Bayanihan, Julio has her hands and head full with stomping beats, banging coconuts and clicking castanets.

I left not really sure what I had just witnessed. A political satire? A tragicomic, philosophical metaphor on America’s current political situation? A modern Greek drama?

“Wisconsin Death Trip,” the Program in Performing Arts’ new production premiering now, is an appropriate title in more ways than one.

Artie Shaughnessy (Eddie Walsh, COL ’10), a struggling singer-songwriter lives in a mental institution. All the classic stereotypes are present: psychiatric doctors wielding straitjackets and crazy patients. One is a woman vacillating between thinking she is a dog and a normal 1960s housewife. Another is a boy who wants to kill the Pope with a homemade bomb.

Florence, Italy

Georgetown has not lost its edge.

The university’s application process became more competitive this year, as the acceptance rate for the incoming freshman class decreased and the yield increased, continuing a national trend of top colleges becoming even more difficult to get into.