Thursday, October 18, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. in Mathers Theatre
The Insubstantial Pageant: Writing for Performance
Margaret Edson will discuss her perspective that we are born ready to talk and listen, but it takes years to learn to read and write. What is gained and lost when the redolent swirl of human experience is consigned to the abstract, linear, preterite alphabetic code? And what ironies await when the freeze-dried code is reconstituted as live performance?

Margaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961.  Between earning degrees in history and literature, she worked on the cancer and AIDS inpatient unit of a major research hospital.  Wit was written in 1991, widely rejected, first produced in 1995, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999.  The HBO production won the Emmy Award for Best Film in 2001.  Wit  has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages and was presented on Broadway in 2012.  The script is used in classes ranging from AP English to medical ethics. Ms. Edson has been a classroom teacher for twenty years.  She currently teaches sixth-grade social studies.  She lives in Atlanta with her partner, art historian Linda Merrill, and their two sons.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Norman M. Eberly Writing Center and the Departments of English, American Studies and Theatre & Dance. 

 

The English department open house for Homecoming & Family Weekend Saturday, Sept. 29 from 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon in East College 405. Professors Claire Bowen and Carol Ann Johnston will discuss poems by John Donne and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning play that invokes the poems, Margaret Edson's Wit, in advance of Edson's visit to campus. Faculty will also be available to converse with parents, students, and alumni. Refreshments served.

Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang will visit Dickinson September 12 as the recipient of The Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program award. Hwang will present a lecture, followed by a book signing, on Wednesday, Sept. 12 at 7:30 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium, West Louther Street between College and Cherry streets. He will receive the award that evening. For further information, check out the news release on David Henry Hwang.