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Staged reading of playwright Denis Johnson's work
The New York State Writers Institute and Fence magazine will present a staged reading of Denis Johnson’s new play-in-progress “Des Moines,” followed by commentary and Q&A with the playwright.
Set in a seedy apartment on the edge of Des Moines, Iowa, the play features an unlikely assortment of people who come together for an impromptu party that takes them on a dam-bursting ride down a stream-of-consciousness deluge.
Staged reading of playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis's work
Stephen Adly Guirgis, 1990 UAlbany graduate, is one of the leading playwrights of his generation. His works include “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” (2005), named one of the “10 Best Plays of the Year” by Time and Entertainment Weekly, and “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” (2000) winner of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award. Five of Guirgis’s plays have been directed by Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. He is currently at work on a screenplay about gay African American world boxing champion Emile Griffith.
Staged reading of Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century
The Writers Institute will present staged readings of short, rediscovered early 20th century plays from the new volume Women Writers of the Provincetown Players (2009) by UAlbany English Professor Judith E. Barlow. Enormously influential in American drama, the Provincetown Players (1915-22), remembered primarily for productions of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, also featured work by such notable women playwrights as Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bryant.
Staged readings of Single Black Female and Underground,
by Lisa Thompson (February 5, 2007)
Constructed of comic vignettes, Thompson's most recent play, "Single Black Female" (1999), is a two-woman performance that explores the lives, loves, and identities of middle class African American women. Her new play-in-progress is "Underground," an examination of slavery's lingering impact on African-Americans in the twenty-first century. (New York Times Review)
Three ways of looking at The Moore by Russell Banks (October 10, 2006)
Printed Text, Stage Adaptation, Short film
Russell Banks' award-winning short story "The Moor" is the tender, affecting tale of a chance encounter between a middle-aged man and the 80-year-old woman who had been his lover three decades earlier, when he was 19 and she 49. The Writers Institute will present a unique opportunity to experience the story in three different formats--the printed text, a stage adaptation, and a 2005 screen adaptation by Caerthan Banks, the author's daughter.
Staged reading of Blind Date by Horton Foote (May 1, 2006)
Set in a small Texas town in 1929, "Blind Date" explores what can happen when adults attempt to play the "matching game" with members of the younger generation.
Staged reading of Mohawk by Richard Russo (March 9, 2004)
Mohawk, Richard Russo’s 1986 novel, has—for the very first time—been adapted for the stage. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author granted permission to write an adaptation to the NYS Writers Institute and UAlbany theatre professor W. Langdon Brown. Mohawk is the story of an upstate New York manufacturing town that suffers from low economic activity, high unemployment, and polluted water. The characters of the play, like the novel, are trapped in less-than-satisfactory circumstances, all of them victims of failed ambitions, bad habits, and unhappy family lives, as well as petty feuds with their neighbors.
Staged reading of The Doctor Stories by Richard Selzer (February 3, 2004)
Nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award The Doctor Stories is an adaptation for the stage of five harrowing, thought-provoking, truth-based medical tales by award-winning author and surgeon Richard Selzer in collaboration with playwright Kathryn G. Maes. Four of the stories are taken from Selzer’s 1998 book of the same name, and one is based on a new autobiographical tale.
Sally by Sandra Seaton (February 4, 2003)
performed by Zabryna Guevera
An imaginative recreation of a complex, vital Sally Hemings who refused
to be identified as merely the mistress of Thomas Jefferson. The Sally Hemings dramatized here is a woman who seized the opportunity to enjoy French fashion and culture, a woman whose intellect and taste were limited neither by her legal status
nor racial categorization. The experience of Paris is central to this Sally Hemings. She never forgot either the freedom it promised
or the wider world it offered. The Africa passed down in family stories
and the Paris she lived in provide this Sally Hemings with an awareness
of societies and standards beyond her own time and place. She will never
accept slavery for herself or her children as natural or inevitable.
All Hallowed, by Bill C. Davis (January
31, 2002)
This work-in-progress explores the complex emotions and personal interactions
of a family as they deal with a father's death and burial on Halloween.
Blackjack, by Erin Marie Tschantret and Stephen de Seve (February 1, 1999)
In the tradition of 1930's screwball comedies, Blackjack, the story of
a female boxer's rise to fame, is full of laughs with a surprise every minute. Tschantret, an Albany native, is an actor as well
as a playwright. She performed the role of "Cecily" in Capital
Rep's production of The Importance of Being Earnest, for which she was
named one of the Top Ten Actresses of the Year by Albany's Metroland Magazine.
De Seve is a musician, performer and author of the novel In My Grandmothers
Garden, and a New York City transportation diary, The Database of Rain. (Times Union article)
An evening with Anna Manahan (February 8, 1999)
Irish actress Anna Manahan received a Tony Award nomination in 1969 for
her role in the Broadway production of Brian's Friel's Lovers. Returning to Broadway 30 years later, Manahan won the 1998
Tony Award for her portrayal of "Mag" in the critically acclaimed production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Born in
Waterford City, Manahan has played numerous roles in Irish and English theatre and television over an acting career
spanning five decades. Manahan will present scenes from her plays and reflect on her life in the theatre. (Times Union article)
Oscar Wilde:
Confounding the Critics and Surviving the Scandal (February
10, 1999)
Merlin Holland, grandson of Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde and author of The
Wilde Album, will reflect on how Wilde, always a mirror of the times, moved from a first-rate funny man in the second rank
of dramatists to a member of the Literary Pantheon. As a preface to Holland's lecture, Authors Theatre will present readings
of scenes from Wilde's four comedies: Lady Windemere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance
of Being Earnest. As Wilde had said, "life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it." (Times
Union article)
Side Man, by Warren Leight (January 26, 1998)
A 1950's jazz sax player destroys his family in his quest for perfection
in his music. As told by his son, a slick commercial writer, this memory play is both an indictment of artistic obsession and
a search for deliverance from mediocrity. Warren Leight is an award-winning
playwright and screenwriter whose works include the plays of Stray Cats and The Loop and the films The Night We Never Met and Me and Him.
Reading and demonstration by Mary Gallagher (February 2, 1998)
Meet Mary Gallagher, award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and fiction
writer who will be in residence at Capital Repertory. Recipient of a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gallagher will create an adaptation
of Shakespeare's Macbeth with 60 actors from the Capital District in a
series of workshops on mask-making, movement, and improvisation. Her reading/demonstration
will be an introduction to the scope of her work, which ranges from realistic
slice-of-life drama to storytelling with mask and myth.
The Talk, by Frank Pugliese (February 9, 1998)
Naked Angels, a New York City theatre collective, will present a reading
of playwright and screenwriter Frank Pugliese's newest work about four brothers who struggle to understand their mother's
suicide. An artistic director for Naked Angels, Pugliese's plays include The Summer Winds, The King of Connecticut, and Aven'U Boy, which won an Obie Award. He also has written episodes for the television series "Homicide" and "Fallen
Angels."
A staged reading of A
Question of Mercy, by David Rabe (February 12, 1998)
Adapted from the essay by Dr. Richard Selzer
Dr. Richard Selzer's essay on a physician-assisted suicide of an AIDS patient
was originally published in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Playwright David Rabe's adaption premiered at the
New York Theatre Workshop on February 7, 1997. Following a reading of Rabe's play, Dr. Selzer will provide commentary
and discuss the artistic differences between his original essay and the adaptation.
The Last Man
in Europe: George Orwell in His Own Words by Mark Weston
(January 27, 1997)
Piecing together George Orwell's prose from his novels, essays, journalism
and letters, Mark Weston has created a two-act drama on the life of the English author. Recently presented at Eton, Oxford
and London, England the play stars Michael Allinson as Orwell and is directed by Michael Alexander. Cosponsored by
the Greater Capital Region Teacher Center
Henry James' The
Turn of the Screw, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher (February
8, 1997)
An adaptation of Henry James' novella of children, ghosts, and unreality.
Hatcher's version features two actors playing all the parts. Hatcher's
most recent plays include Two Nikita and Three Viewings. New York Magazine has called Hatcher, "a new, true, idiosyncratic voice in the theater."
Miserere, by Robert Stone (February 15, 1997)
Novelist and short story writer Robert Stone, author of the novels A Hall
of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), which won the National Book Award, A Flag for Sunrise (1981), Children of Light (1986),
and Outerbridge Reach (1992), has adapted his short story Miserere into a play. A controversial story of abortion,
Catholic faith and responsibility, Miserere first appeared in the June
24 and July 1, 1996 summer fiction issue of The New Yorker.
A staged reading of Shopping Cart Soldiers, by John Mulligan (December 3, 1997)
This staged reading with movement, dance, and music of the dramatic adaptation of John Mulligan's novel is developed from a workshop conducted by University at Albany Theatre Department faculty and students. Shopping Cart Soldiers makes use of expressionist, surreal, and fabulist theatre conventions. The play was concurrently be developed by the San Jose Stage Company.
"This book is unprecedented in conveying the mythic truth of war." - Maxine Hong Kingston
Grand View by William Kennedy (January 13, 1996)
Albany's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, William Kennedy reveals a secret
piece of Albany's history. Grand View dramatizes a titanic clash between
the Democratic machine of Albany County and the Republicans controlling
the State house.
The Black Swan by Richard Selzer (January 27, 1996)
Richard Selzer, author of nine collections of essays and stories, including
his autobiography Down From Troy (1992) and his most recent work Raising the Dead (1994), is a retired surgeon. Termed "the
poet laureate of medicine" by the Wall Street Journal Selzer returned to an oddly medical subject in this dramatic rewriting
of Thomas Mann's novella about a woman "cured" by love.
Irene Worth's Portrait of Edith
Wharton by actress Irene Worth (February
2, 1996)
Three- time Tony Award winner Irene Worth evoked the inner life of novelist
Edith Wharton in a performance she adapted from Wharton's letters, diaries, novels, and autobiography. "It's
sharing literature with friends," Worth said, "like an old-fashioned evening."