Everyone’s Talking!
The Marie Antoinette Discussion Series
Thursday, September 6, following the 7:30PM performance: A Discussion with Fellows from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the Loeb Fellowship Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design
Moderated by Nieman Foundation Curator Ann Marie Lipinski.
Panel includes playwright Lydia Diamond, producer Helen Marriage, and New York Times Book Review editor Jennifer MacDonald.
Lydia Diamond’s plays include: Stick Fly (’12 Outer Circle Critics Nomination – Best Play [Broadway],’10 Irne Award – Best Play, ’10 LA Critics Circle Award – Playwriting, ’10 LA Garland Award – Playwriting, ’09 LA Weekly Theatre Award – Playwriting, ’08 Susan S. Blackburn Finalist, ‘06 Black Theatre Alliance Award), Voyeurs de Venus (’06 Joseph Jefferson Award – Best New Work, ‘06 BTAA – Best Writing), The Bluest Eye (’06 Black Arts Alliance Image Award – Best New Play, ‘08 American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Play Award), The Gift Horse (’05 Theodore Ward Prize, Kesselring Prize 2nd Place), Harriet Jacobs and, Stage Black. Theatres include: Arena Stage, Cort Theatre (Broadway), Chicago Dramatists, Company One, Congo Square, Everyman Theatre Company, Freedom Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre Co., Jubilee Theatre, Kansas City Rep, Long Wharf, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, McCarter Theatre Co., Mo’Olelo Theatre Co., MPAACT, New Vic (Off Broadway), Playmakers Rep, Plowshares Theatre Co., Steppenwolf, TrueColors, and Contemporary American Theatre Festival. Commissions include: Steppenwolf (3), McCarter, Huntington, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville/Victory Gardens, Humana, Boston University, and The Roundabout. Stick Fly and Harriet Jacobs published by NU Press, Bluest Eye, Gift Horse, Stage Black – Dramatic Publishing, Stick Fly – Samuel French. Lydia is a graduate of Northwestern University where she majored in Performance Studies. Lydia was an ’05/’06 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute non-resident Fellow, a 2007 TCG/NEA Playwright in Residence at Steppenwolf, an 06/07 Huntington Playwright Fellow, a 2012 Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a 2012 Sally B. Goodman McCarter Fellow, a 2012 Sundance Institute Playwright Lab Creative Advisor, is Co-Vice President of Theatre Communication Group’s Board of Directors, is a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, has an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Pine Manor College, and is on faculty at Boston University.
Helen Marriage is co-founder of Artichoke, based in London, and producer of urban spectacle, celebration and disruption. Her work injects unorthodox behavior into an urban setting to make people reflect on the place where they live, work and play –its possibilities, limitations and potential for stimulating new ideas. In 2006, Artichoke brought The Sultan’s Elephant to London and captivated a million residents for four days. Helen will study the intersection of design, public art and urban infrastructure at the GSD.
Jennifer B. McDonald is an editor at The New York Times Book Review, where she assigns reviews of fiction and nonfiction and occasionally writes. Her beats include linguistics, race, popular history, dance, science and technology, sex and gender, art and media, and graphic novels and reportage. Since 2008, she has been on the faculty of the Times’s Student Journalism Institute, an intensive training program for undergraduate and graduate-level journalists. She joined the Times as an editor on the national desk in 2005. She was previously an editor at The Washington Post and at CNET News.com in San Francisco. McDonald will study canonical works of literature and philosophy, and the historical role of the critic in culture.
Saturday, September 8, following the 2:00PM matinee performance: Post-performance Discussion with Members of the Marie Antoinette Cast
Wednesday, September 12, following the 2:00PM matinee performance: Post-performance Discussion with Members of the Marie Antoinette Cast
Wednesday, September 12, following the 7:30PM performance: Marie Antoinette and Her Architect
A discussion with Harvard Professor of French History Patrice Higonnet
Presented in collaboration with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (www.ces.fas.harvard.edu)
Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard. He has published on many historical themes ranging from seventeenth- and twenty-first-century art, eighteenth-century diplomacy, nineteenth-century French deputies, American nationalism, French immigrants to America, French rural life, and the Vichy years (1940-1944). Higonnet’s book Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles (1981) is a study of Jacobin politics during the French Revolution. Sister Republics (1988) compares the French and American revolutions. Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins in the French Revolution (1998) considers the genesis and evolution of Jacobinism during the French revolution. His Paris: Capital of the World (2002) described the history and myths of the French capital from 1750-1940. His Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American History appeared in 2007. Most recently Higonnet has returned to an examination of the French Revolution. His “micro-storia” biography of Marie Antoinette’s architect Richard Mique, who designed her toy farm at Versailles and was executed in 1794 with his son and his republican son-in-law, was published in 2010. Three essays (in Past and Present, 2006; in the Revue Historique, 2010; and in the forthcoming Festschrift for E. Leroy-Ladurie) comprise an outline for an upcoming book (The Dreams and Sleep of Reason) on the origins and nature of “Jacobin Terrorism.”
Saturday, September 15, following the 2:00PM matinee performance: Post-performance Discussion with Members of the Marie Antoinette Cast
Wednesday, September 19, following the 2:00PM matinee performance: Post-performance Discussion with Members of the Marie Antoinette Cast
Wednesday, September 19, following the 7:30PM performance: A conversation with playwright David Adjmi
Moderated by A.R.T. Dramaturg Ryan McKittrick
Presented in collaboration with PEN New England (http://www.pen-ne.org/)
In addition to writing Marie Antoinette, David Adjmi is the author of Elective Affinities, the 2011 site-specific Off-Broadway hit starring four-time Tony winner Zoe Caldwell (commissioned by the Royal Court; world premiere at Royal Shakespeare Company). Other plays include Stunning (LCT3, Woolly Mammoth), The Evildoers (Sundance, Yale Rep, Royal Court), 3C (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, piece bypiece productions & Rising Phoenix Repertory), Caligula (Soho Rep Studio Series), and Strange Attractors (Empty Space). His new play, Marie Antoinette, will receive co-world premiere productions at the A.R.T. in Cambridge, MA and Yale Rep in New Haven, CT in Fall 2012. David’s many honors include receiving the 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award in Playwriting, 2009 Steinberg Playwright Award, 2009 Bush Fellowship, 2009 Kesselring Fellowship, Helen Merrill Award, Marian Seldes-Garson Kanin Award, Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellowship, multiple MacDowell Colony fellowships, Sundance/Ucross residency and others. David has been awarded commissions from Lincoln Center Theater, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court. A collection of David’s work, Stunning and Other Plays is published by TCG, and he is currently writing a novel for Harper Collins.
Saturday, September 22, following the 2:00PM matinee performance: Post-performance Discussion with Members of the Marie Antoinette Cast
Wednesday, September 26, following the 7:30PM performance: The Queen of Fashion
A Conversation with Columbia University Professor Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
Presented in collaboration with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (www.ces.fas.harvard.edu)
Caroline Weber is an associate professor of French literature at Barnard College,Columbia University, and a specialist in eighteenth-century French history and culture. She received her AB summa cum laude from Harvard and her PhD from Yale. Her books include Terror and Its Discontents (U of Minn Press 2003) and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Picador 2007), as well as an edited volume called Fragments of Revolution (Yale UP 2002). She is currently at work on Proust’s Duchess (Knopf, forthcoming 2014), a study of the high-society salons of the Belle Epoque. In addition to her academic writings, Professor Weber regularly contributes essays to such publications as The New York Times Book Review, W Magazine, and Vogue. Her work on contemporary and historical cultural phenomena has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall St Journal, The Financial Times, Town and Country, New York Magazine, and Washington Post Book World.
Thursday, September 27, following the 7:30PM performance: Marie Antoinette as a Cultural Construction and a Cultural Agent
A Conversation with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University
Presented in Collaboration with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University
(www.ces.fas.harvard.edu)