AACC’s Department of Performing Arts is gearing up for its spring performances.

AACC Theater will present “Museum,” a play by Tina Howe, while Opera AACC will take on a more expansive production with Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera, “Dead Man Walking.” AACC’s Overcast Improv will host three shows throughout the semester.

“‘Museum’ actually came to us from one of the students we had,” Sean Urbantke, a theater professor, said. “I hadn’t thought about doing anything like it. [It follows] the last day of a modern art museum exhibit … and you witness dozens of characters come through the space, and you just witness a little slice of their lives.”

The theater department has invited alumni as guest artists to direct the show.

Urbantke will hold auditions for “Museum” in the last week of January.

Still, Urbantke said, the opera program “are the ones doing the more musical-inspired pieces this semester.”

Opera AACC will produce “Dead Man Walking,” in March. The show is based on the real-life work of Sister Helen Prejean, an advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.

“Considering the incumbent president’s vow to reinstate the federal death penalty, I feel even more strongly that the urgent and thoughtful conversations in our families, communities and world needs to be given light and grace,” Douglas Byerly, a music professor and the show’s director, said in an email. “No matter what your stance on the death penalty is, we all need to work on forgiveness and healing.”

The cast consists of AACC students, alumni, professionals and adjunct faculty members. Performances will take place the third weekend of March in the Kauffman Theater.

The student club Overcast Improv will perform during AACC Theater’s Black Box Series—a program of brief one-act plays written and directed by students—in February. Club leaders Éva Parry and Jason Kalshoven said the troupe will put on two more shows.