For most of the last six years, going to a show at James Dunn Theatre meant planning around a construction site. The library had moved out of its longtime building into Fusselman Hall as a temporary fix. A parking lot disappeared. Staff quietly told visitors to budget an extra twenty minutes just to find their way in. That era ended this spring, and the season now opening at the theatre is the first one built for a campus that isn't half torn up anymore.
The Fencing Came Down in March
The building at the center of all this disruption was the Learning Resources Center, a three-story, 78,000-square-foot project meant to combine the college's library, classrooms, labs, and offices into one structure along College Avenue. Trustees approved a $67 million construction contract back in 2023, with the goal of breaking ground that August and opening in 2026. Before that, the library had already spent years operating out of Fusselman Hall, the building's original home, after the old Learning Resources Center was demolished in the summer of 2020. Parking Lot 5, which used to serve that stretch of campus, closed permanently and never came back.
The new building held its ribbon cutting and grand opening on March 11, 2026, which means this fall is the first full drama season running against a finished campus rather than a construction zone. If you haven't been to College Avenue in a while, the difference is not cosmetic. The detours, the rerouted foot traffic, the missing lot, all of it is settled. Whatever hesitation kept you from popping over for an evening show is gone along with the fencing.
Why the Drama Department Picked This Play for Now
The season opener, running October 2 through 18 at James Dunn Theatre, is Jane Anderson's "Defying Gravity." What makes the timing worth noting isn't the play alone. It's tied directly to the 2026 COMmon Read selection, Javier Zamora's memoir "Solito," and to the college's approach to its own Centennial. Drama students are building an original community-based theatre project around migration stories tied to that reading, and the choice carries a detail that only makes sense if you know the college's history: Zamora's parents were ESL students at College of Marin during the years surrounding his own migration journey at age nine. The department is using its stage to mark a hundred years of the institution by reaching for a story that runs directly through its own classrooms.
That kind of programming choice fits a department with a long memory. The drama program was founded in 1964 by director James Dunn, the man the theatre is named for, and has staged more than 250 productions since. Robin Williams came through this program. So did David Dukes and Kathleen Quinlan. A junior college theatre department with that kind of alumni list doesn't program lightly, and choosing a Centennial-year opener that reaches back into a student's family history says something about how the college wants to spend this particular season.
Here's how the rest of the fall lines up at the 585-seat theatre:
| Production | Dates | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Defying Gravity (Jane Anderson) | October 2-18, 2026 | Tied to 2026 COMmon Read and Centennial programming |
| Winter drama production (Lanford Wilson) | December 3-13, 2026 | Evening performances Thu-Sat, 2pm Sunday matinees Dec 6 and Dec 13 |
The December slot is Wilson's "Book of Days," the small-town Missouri mystery that follows Ruth Hoch, a community theatre actress turned reluctant investigator after a death rattles her town. It's a sharp contrast to the October opener, trading a memoir-adjacent community project for a scripted whodunit, and it gives the season two very different reasons to walk into the same building six weeks apart.
The Corridor Around the Shows
None of this happens in isolation. College Avenue has run on the same two anchors for years, and neither one waited for the construction to finish.
Half Day Cafe sits directly across from campus and has for a long time been the neighborhood's default answer to breakfast and brunch. It doesn't take reservations, so you give your name to the host and wait, sometimes a half hour on a busy weekday, and the room fills with ivy and big windows while you do. That consistency earned it the 2026 Best of the County award for Breakfast/Brunch, a recognition that reflects years of showing up the same way rather than any recent reinvention.
A few blocks up, Guesthouse takes the evening shift. Chef Jared Rogers spent a decade at Larkspur's Picco before opening this 110-seat room, and the menu leans on seasonal, ingredient-driven California cooking with weekly traditions built in: Prime Rib Monday and Sunday fried chicken. That second tradition lines up neatly with the theatre's own calendar. Both Sunday performances in December let out at a 2pm matinee, which means the crowd walking out of "Book of Days" on December 6 or December 13 has a standing invitation to fried chicken a short walk away.
None of this is new information if you already eat at Half Day Cafe on a Saturday or know Guesthouse's Monday special by heart. What's new is that the theatre, the library, and the restaurant strip are all finally running on the same uninterrupted campus for the first time in years, which means the evening you might have skipped because of construction headaches is worth reconsidering now.
What Changes for Someone Who Lives Here
The honest version of this story isn't that Kentfield got a new attraction. It's that an old one, one that's been quietly running for six decades, finally has its infrastructure caught up to its programming. The theatre never stopped producing shows during the construction years. The restaurants never closed. What changed is the friction around getting there, and that friction is the thing that kept a lot of residents from treating College Avenue as a normal Thursday or Sunday option.
If you've been putting off a show because the last time you tried, Parking Lot 5 was gone and the whole block felt like a detour, that reason no longer applies. The building is open. The lot isn't coming back, but the rest of campus has absorbed that loss. What's left is a season built around a hundred years of institutional memory, staged six blocks from a bakery case and a Monday prime rib special that have been running just as long.
Kentfield doesn't need a reason to visit its own college. It just needed the fencing to come down.
If you're weighing what a season like this means for a neighborhood's day-to-day rhythm, or you're curious how programming and infrastructure shifts like this tend to ripple through a place over time, The Warrin Team has spent years reading Marin's neighborhoods this closely. Reach out anytime you want a second set of local eyes.
