Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Dael Orlandersmith Rescheduled to May 1st!


Please note that Dael Orlandersmith, Obie-winning playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama, has rescheduled her appearances to Monday, May 1st (she was originally scheduled to appear March 20th).


Orlandersmith will deliver the annual Burian Lecture about her life in the theater and her powerful new play, “Until the Flood,” about explosive events and racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri. Her work frequently explores the struggles of African Americans in urbans settings, and life in the rough East Harlem neighborhood of her childhood. Cosponsored by the Jarka and Grayce Burian Endowment and UAlbany’s Theatre Program


May 1 (Monday):  The 21st Annual Burian Lecture— Dael Orlandersmith, award-winning playwright 

Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

The Burian Lecture — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

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Tuesday, April 21, 2015

UAlbany Grad Stephen Guirgis Wins Pulitzer

Stephen Adly Guirgis, who graduated from the University at Albany in 1990 with a major in Theatre, is the 2015 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his new play "Between Riverside and Crazy."

The Pulitzer jury called the work, "a nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death."

Guirgis visited the New York State Writers Institute on April 12, 2010.

More about his visit here:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/guirgis_stephen10.html

An interview with Guirgis posted on the Institute's YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFR2iMDmcFE

Guirgis studied theatre with NYS Writers Institute Fellow and UAlbany Professor W. Langdon Brown and with the late Jarka Burian of the Theatre Department who-- together with his wife Grayce Burian-- established and endowed the Institute's annual Burian Lecture on the art of the theatre.

More on the Burian Lecture here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/burian_lectures.html

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Thursday, April 3, 2014

New Event-- Staged Reading of a New Play


HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED     
A play by Eszter Szalczer

Followed by Q&A with playwright, director and cast
Directed by W. Langdon Brown
A staged reading with cast members Janet Hurley Kimlicko, Steve Madore, Gary Maggio, Patrick McKenna, Barbara Richards, Eileen Schuyler and Don Paul Shannon

April 8 (Tuesday)
Dramatic Reading – 7:00 p.m. [Note early start time], Science Library 340, Uptown Campus

Whose story is the true story? How can one grasp control of the narratives of one’s own life? Working on her new book, writer Karin Smirnoff (1880-1973) struggles to come to terms with her past in an attempt to challenge the notorious stories of her overbearing father, the world-renowned author and dramatist August Strindberg.

Eszter Szalczer is a dramaturg, theatre historian, and scholar of modern drama. Her recent book August Strindberg (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists, 2010) focuses on the Swedish playwright as one of the most radical innovators of the modern stage. It was when working on her previous book, Writing Daughters: August Strindberg's Other Voices (Norvik Press 2008) that Eszter became interested in exploring the creative processes of writing, the role of memory, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and how the same story could be told differently from several different perspectives.

Langdon Brown is a Fellow of the Writers Institute, UAlbany English professor and director of Authors Theatre. He has worked as a producer, arts administrator, director and dramaturge in the London Fringe, Off-Broadway, regional theatre, and on a variety of university campuses.

Cast

Janet Hurley Kimlicko. A member of Actor’s Equity, she has performed in Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and New York City. She was last seen in How Water Behaves (CapRep), The Little Foxes, Arms and the Man and Ah! Wilderness with Theater Voices, and Right You Are (Theater East).

Steve Madore received his MA in Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism from the State University of New York at Albany and has completed several years of coursework as a doctoral student in the Department of Theatre and Drama at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Gary Maggio, semi-retired, works part-time as a standardized patient at Albany Medical College. Recently he's acted in productions of Harvey, The Boys Next Door, and Our Son's Wedding (Curtain Call Theatre) Proof and Faith Healer (Albany Civic Theater), and The Vanek Plays (Theater Voices).

Patrick McKenna has performed on Capital Region stages for the past 30 years. Favorite roles include Tom in The Glass Menagerie; Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest; the Narrator in Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood and Dylan Thomas in A Child's Christmas in Wales.

Barbara Richards is a graduate of the University at Albany's Theatre Department. She has had a career in theatre and arts administration in New York and Albany, and has worked extensively as an actress with Curtain Call Theatre in Latham for the past 15 years

Eileen Schuyler is delighted to return to UAlbany, where she taught acting for nine years. She has performed at Soho Rep, Studio Arena Theater, Fulton Opera House, Capital Rep, Stageworks/Hudson, Proctors Theater, HRS Showcase Theatre, Queens Theater in the Park, NYSTI, Hubbard Hall and the Kennedy Center. 

Don Paul Shannon began his acting career in Philadelphia doing Shakespeare, Chekhov, O'Neill, and DeGhelderode. At Lasalle Summer Theater he had starring roles in several musicals: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, My Fair Lady, Allegro, and more.

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Friday, March 7, 2014

Our Poet Laureate of the Absurd-- Christopher Durang

Christopher Durang, who visits us on Monday 3/10, is crowned "Poet Laureate of the Absurd" in a New York Observer review of his 2009 play, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them.

"It’s very good news that Christopher Durang, our Poet Laureate of the Absurd, has written a smashing new play. Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public Theater is a black farce that’s essentially about, well, torture, and a peculiar brand of American paranoia and bigotry—and I haven’t had such fun at the theater since the recent revival of Mr. Durang’s fable about his own dysfunctional childhood, The Marriage of Bette and Boo."

More in the Observer:  http://observer.com/2009/04/im-tickled-by-torture-durang-deals-serious-comedy/

More about Durang's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/durang_chris14.html

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Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Guirgis Talks About Philip Seymour Hoffman


Playwright and UAlbany alum Stephen Adly Guirgis talks about his close friend and artistic collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman during his visit to the Writers Institute in 2010.

A theater director as well as an actor, Hoffman directed five plays written by Guirgis for New York City's award-winning LAByrinth Theatre Company.

The Oscar-winning actor and upstate New York native died earlier this month of a drug overdose.

Watch the YouTube video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFR2iMDmcFE

More about Guirgis:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/guirgis_stephen10.html

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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Enthralling theater and television....

“Enthralling theater and television… This is dramatized legal history of the best kind,” said New York Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante of Friday's film, Thurgood, 7:30 p.m. at Page Hall, 9/20.

Bellafante approaches this piece of filmed theater skeptically at first, but is wildly enthusiastic by the end of her review:

"As a form the teleplay is mired in its own noble pedantry, which is why the arrival of “Thurgood” on HBO on Thursday initially seems dubious — especially so, perhaps, because it is a one-man enterprise even more heavily prone to the sensibility of tutorial."

Full review here:  http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/arts/television/24thurgood.html?_r=0

Full Classic Film Series schedule here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html

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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Czech Treasure: The Jarka M. Burian Collection at Ohio State

Institute friends Grayce Burian and her husband, the late Jarka Burian, a distinguished member of the UAlbany Theatre faculty, are the subjects of an article in the current issue of  Folio, the newsletter of The Ohio State University Libraries. An excerpt follows:

The Czech Collections at the Theatre Research Institute
by Nena Couch

"The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute is an active participant in a variety of international initiatives and partnerships involving Czech theatre…"

"One of the Institute’s major Czech treasures is the Jarka M. Burian collection which offers a tremendous resource for researchers in Czech theatre, containing his research papers, posters, programs, photographs, taped interviews with Czech theatre artists, books, and other materials. The Burian collection also documents major cultural and political events, including the Soviet bloc invasion in 1968, which Jarka and Grayce Burian experienced during their many research trips to Prague. Many individual theatre artists including playwright Václav Havel (later President of the Czech Republic), and the majority of scenographers whose design work is held at the Lawrence and Lee Institute are documented in the Burian papers."

"The Burian collection provides a focus of international engagement. During fall 2010, the Institute hosted visiting Fulbright Fellow Barbora Príhodová, Ph.D. student at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Príhodová’s Fulbright project was part of her doctoral dissertation work on scenographer Josef Svoboda. While it may seem counter-intuitive, it was in fact necessary for Czech scholar Príhodová to come to Columbus to research Czech scenographer Svoboda in order to, as she noted, 'benefit from Jarka Burian’s unique heritage as well as the rich American academic culture.' …"

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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

YouTube Sensation Sorab Wadia at UAlbany

Sorab Wadia, who stars Wednesday, April 18th in a one-man theatrical adaptation of the bestselling novel, The Kite Runner, became a YouTube sensation in 2007 with his show-stopping number, "I Wanna Be Like Osama" in "Jihad: The Musical" at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. To date, the video has received more than 400,000 hits.

See the video here.

Wadia also performed as Ali Hakim in the U.S. national tour of Trevor Nunn’s production of Oklahoma!. Other credits include the film Suburban Girl (2006) with Sarah Michelle Gellar, the TV sitcom 30 Rock, and the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, in which he plays the voice of an Indian pedestrian who curses graphically in Hindi. More.

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