By Jackie Demaline
Enquirer staff writer

Northern Kentucky University Summer Dinner Theatre wraps its sold-out three-show season today, and department head Ken Jones is already planning for summer 2005.

There won't be a move out of the intimate black box into the Corbett Theater, and because of the academic year the season can't be extended. What Jones is planning is another row of seats, which will make 18 more tickets available for every performance, which now run Tuesday-Sunday.

And what fine seats they will be. NKU has debuted its "Have a Seat!" campaign for the black box theater. The aim is to raise $40,000, for seats that will be wider, have armrests and flip up automatically when you stand to let someone pass, which will make a lot of people happy. For more information call (859) 572-6362.

Also new at NKU, assistant theater department chair Sam Zachary is the program's newly named artistic director. "We want the students to learn how professional theater works, learn a little more about the process," Jones says of the appointment.

Watch for Jones early in the new year, co-starring with David Scott Morgan in Greater Tuna, playing Jan. 20-Feb. 6 at Covedale Center for the Performing Arts.

Graduate appearance

Last week we wrote about students from St. Ursula Academy performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It turns out a St. Ursula grad will be there, too.

Catherine DeCioccio, Hyde Park resident and theater major at Otterbein College, is performing with the Loose Elephant Theatre Company in the world premiere of an original one-act comedy How to Lock Up, Talk Down and Get Things Done.

She hooked up with the project last summer, thanks to an acting internship at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, N.Y., where she met playwright Jeffrey King and some of the show's principals.

She is planning on cheering on the St. Ursula troupe during her down time.

International fringe

Speaking of fringe festivals, longtime Cincinnati Shakespeare leading lady and founding member Marni Penning will be performing in the New York International Fringe Festival in the "beat poetry rock musical" Subway Train at the Players Theatre Aug. 18-28.

Then it's back to Shakespeare. Penning will join Cincinnati's Drew and Sherman Fracher in Atlanta at Georgia Shakespeare Festival (oh, that we could see the Fracher's work in Cincinnati more often) for an October run of Macbeth. Drew Fracher is directing.

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E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com