MUD and a scene from THE CONDUCT OF LIFE by Maria Irene Fornes
Live reading Sunday, August 5, 8 pm
JoAnne Akalaitis will direct a reading of Maria Irene Fornes’ play, Mud, as well as a scene from another Fornes play, The Conduct of Life.
Mud is an hour-long, two-act play depicting self-improvement as a wistful goal and the bleakness of everyday life as an inescapable fate. The Conduct of Life (1985) is one of Fornes’ most critically acclaimed plays. This work brings together issues of politics, gender, and sexuality to show how forms of national and domestic violence often exist in direct relationship to one another.
A discussion will follow the reading.
The bar will be open.
Readers are Tom Bills, Joan Jonas, Erik Moskowitz, Amanda Trager, and Elizabeth Whalley
Running time approx. 1 hour 30 minutes.
Sunday, August 5, 8 – 9:30 pm
Admission by donation
Maria Irene Fornes
Winner of nine Obie Awards, Maria Irene Fornes has written over 40 plays, many of which she directed, and is regarded as one of the most significant writing teachers of our time. She is considered one of the pioneers of the Off-Off Broadway experimental theatre movement.
Off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre devoted its entire 1999-2000 season to her work, and her epic What of the Night? was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. At the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway experimental theater movement in NYC, the incomparable Cuban-American playwright is often referred to as American theater’s “Mother Avant-Garde.”
But despite her remarkable contributions, most still do not know her name. A headline on the cover of The Village Voice once read, “Irene Fornes is America’s Great Unknown Playwright”.
JoAnne Akalaitis will be directing a marathon reading of Fornes plays at the Public Theatre, NYC: http://therestimakeup.com/marathon/.
This free event is in celebration of the release of the new documentary film on Fornes’ life, The Rest I Make Up, which will be screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York August 23–29. http://therestimakeup.com/
Information about the cast for the marathon at the Public Theatre, NYC. http://www.playbill.com/article/kathleen-chalfant-mayaa-boateng-erin-markey-and-more-tapped-for-maria-irene-fornes-marathon-at-the-public
Fornes is the winner of nine Obie Awards and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her play What of the Night? The Cuban-American playwright has written over 40 plays and is considered one of the pioneers of the Off-Off Broadway experimental theatre movement.
“Fornes creates worlds within worlds and hurls us headlong into them: rural poverty, sexual obsession, the brutality within the banal, surreal musical fantasies, nuclear-environmental disasters, zany potentially dangerous period feminists, violence and humor and humiliation and the continual presence of women, usually young, looking for something better, articulating their thoughts in Irene’s beautiful, terse, emotional language which is both highly stylized and surprisingly natura,” says Akalaitis. “This Marathon reading of her work hopes to offer a glimpse into the range of her rich theatrical landscapes and into the heart of an artist who continues to astonish.” (Akalaitis)
JoAnne Akalaitis
JoAnne Akalaitis (born June 29, 1937, Chicago)[1] is an avant-garde Lithuanian American theatre director and writer. She won five Obie Awards for direction (and sustained achievement) and founder of the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines in New York City, from which she resigned after twenty years in June 1990.[2]
Akalaitis was a pre-med student at the University of Chicago, and transferred to Stanford University to study philosophy, before leaving for San Francisco at age 22 without a degree. After choosing acting as a career, she studied with the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, The Open Theater Workshop in New York, and acting theorist Jerzy Grotowski in France. Additionally, as a Mabou Mines founder, she conducted workshops in Mabou’s acting technique.[3]
In addition to the American Repertory Theater – where she has directed Endgame, The Balcony (by Jean Genet) and The Birthday Party (by Harold Pinter) – she has staged works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Schiller, Tennessee Williams, Philip Glass, Janáček, and her own work at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City Opera, Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, Mark Taper Forum, Court Theatre, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and the Guthrie Theater. She is the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and of the Public Theater, and was artist-in-residence at the Court Theatre in Chicago.
Ms. Akalaitis was the Andrew Mellon co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard School, and was the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College until 2012. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Edwin Booth Award, Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre, and Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant.