There is something quietly extraordinary that happens when strangers sit down together in a theater. 

The house lights dim. The stage brightens. And for the next two hours, the person beside you — someone you may have never met, may never meet again — laughs when you laugh, holds their breath when you hold yours, and feels, in some inexplicable way, exactly what you feel. You arrived as individuals. For a little while, you become something else: a community. 

I have been thinking about that a great deal since joining the Haugh family this past April. I am new here, but this theater is not. For more than fifty years, the Haugh Performing Arts Center has stood at the heart of Glendora and the wider San Gabriel Valley — on this beautiful campus, in this remarkable community — as a place where that quiet magic happens. Generations of families have walked through these doors. That legacy humbles me, and it inspires me.

It also gives me a sense of urgency. 

We live, right now, in a peculiar moment. Our phones keep us endlessly connected and, somehow, lonelier than ever. We scroll. We stream. We consume art alone, in the blue glow of a screen, earbuds in, door closed. It is convenient. It is also, I think, quietly costly.

The antidote — one of them, anyway — is this: showing up. Together. In person. In a room that was built for exactly this purpose.

The 2026–2027 Haugh Presents... season has been shaped by a single animating idea: community. Not community as a buzzword, but as a lived and felt experience. Every performance we have chosen this season is an invitation — to gather, to be moved, to turn to the person beside you afterward and say, did you feel that too? We believe the arts don't just reflect community. They build it. They knit us back together when we have come a little unraveled. 

We want to see every seat filled––not because of what it means for our balance sheet, but because of what it means for our theater, and for our town. 

So bring someone. Bring a friend you have been meaning to see. Bring your parents, your teenagers, your neighbors. Introduce yourself to whomever sits next to you. And when the curtain falls and the lights come up, maybe you’ll be just a little bit closer to the people you’re sitting with. 

We have been here for fifty years. We intend to be here for fifty more — and we want you with us. 

With gratitude and great excitement,

Gilles Chiasson 
Director of the Haugh Performing Arts Center 
gchiasson@citruscollege.edu