The Department of Theater invites you to a staged reading of a new play titled HAPPY?, Honors Playwriting Thesis for Joshua Lipman ’11.  Happy is the term we use for fulfillment. Happy is the emotional state we are supposed to embody.  Happy is the goal. Happy is the bar against which we measure ourselves. Happy is the most highly valued and elusive thing on Earth. Happy is the bright side of a black hole. Happy is the search for joy in offing yourself. “Happy?”
May 2nd and 4th, 2011 at 7PM in the Frear Ensemble Theater

The Department of Theater presents Aristophanes’ LYSISTRATA. Performances will be on Friday, April 29th at 6 pm and 10 pm and on Saturday, April 30th at 7 pm in the Frear. The production will be directed by Eva Amessè ’11, an advanced directing and acting student in the Department of Theater. Lighting design will be by Jacob Gilbert ’12 (Haverford), sound design will be by Louis Jargow ’10, and costume design will be by Rachel Branker ’12. The faculty advisor for the production is Prof. Allen Kuharski, chair of the Department of Theater.

A cast of twelve Swarthmore actors will perform Dudley Fitts’ adaptation of Aristophanes’ anti-war play about the battle of the sexes, LYSISTRATA. This famous Greek Comedy tells the story of the women from opposing states who spend years suffering in silence, while their sons and husbands are off fighting a war with no end in sight. The women decide to put their differences aside in an effort to get their husbands to lay down their swords. They employ the only tactic that will get the men’s attention: a sex strike.

Eva Amessé ’11 is an Honors Theater Major, with concentrations in Acting and Directing, and an English Literature Minor. She has acted in the department’s productions of Carson’s AN ORESTEIA, Shakespeare’s MACBETH, Shakespeare’s PERICLES, Genet’s THE MAIDS, Wilde’s SALOME, Zimmerman’s METAMORPHOSES and Albee’s THREE TALL WOMEN. Through the Department of Theater Eva directed a scene from Wilson’s LUDLOW FAIR and staged an adaptation of Wasserstein’s UNCOMMON WOMEN AND OTHERS. While at Swarthmore, Eva also performed in the Drama Board’s productions of LACHIUSA and Wolfe’s THE WILD PARTY and Charles Inniss ’08’s original musical, WRITTEN IN THE STARS. Eva was a 2010 Berkshire Theatre Festival Apprentice and played the Mummy in THE MUMMY’S TALE AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE GREAT BEYOND. Eva is an Equity Membership Candidate and understudied the role of Claire in Albee’s A DELICATE BALANCE, directed by David Auburn. Eva is a former intern for Broadway Producer, Jed Bernstein, a proud graduate of the School of the Staten Island Ballet, and a musical theatre enthusiast.

Join us for a night of farce scenes on April 16th and 17th at 7PM during Arts Weekend.  With BOSTON MARRIAGE by David Mamet, directed by Jeannette Leopold ’13 (HC) and IRMA VEP by Charles Ludlum, directed by Michelle Fennell ’12.

NB to the campus: due to a large off-campus crowd attending the Saturday performance as part of Arts Weekend, we will only be able to guarantee seating for current students, faculty and staff at the Sunday performance at 7 pm.  Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

The casts for the program include Monique Alfonso BMC ’14, Maddie Charne ’14, Xena Colby ‘11, Ryane Disken-Cahill ’12, and Anna Russell HC ’14.  Lighting Design is by Justin Hughes ’11.  Sound Design by Louis Jargow ’10.  Stage Management by Hannah Kurtz ’13.

For more info: twebb1@swarthmore.edu or x8260.

Please join us for a staged reading of Isa St. Clair’s mlle., directed by Rebecca Wright with Eva Amesse ’11, Nell Ban-Jensen ’11, Jessie Cannizzaro ’12, Nolan Gear ’12, and Ben Hattem ’12.  April 1st and 2nd at 7PM in the Frear Ensemble Theatre.

This play is an adaptation of Theophile Gautier’s 1834 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin and tells a story of disguise, desire, and a very tangled love triangle. The play explores gender, sexuality, Shakespeare, Romanticism, and the farce we all make of ourselves.

When Theophile Gautier published the novel Mademoiselle du Maupin in 1834, Paris flew into uproar. Polite society swiftly condemned the lascivious novel in public and eagerly devoured it in private. For though it was the height of the Romantic movement in France, no one had yet produced such an admixture of hedonism, romance, ars gratia artis, and a revolutionary treatment of gender and sexuality as Gautier did in Mademoiselle du Maupin. Throughout the novel (and the play), the multivalent characters discover and rediscover their own gender identities and sexual preferences/performances, displacing sexual norms and (self-) constructed identities. As reader or audience, we are never quite sure if we are seeing masks or faces, if we can access an essential truth regarding these characters and their desires, or if that truth exists at all.

The nimbus of controversy surrounding the novel persisted for decades; Mademoiselle du Maupin was the subject of an American lawsuit over its alleged obscenity as late as 1922. But its fame – or infamy – has waned in the intervening years, and Gautier is, in fact, little remembered outside of France. Indeed, the material that made the novel so shocking and forward-looking upon publication is no longer particularly progressive and actually somewhat problematic; Gautier was a revolutionary 1834, but is a little outmoded in 2011. If controversy stems from the piece today, it is because of the novel’s outdated attitudes regarding “acceptable sexuality,” its implicit reinforcement of the gender binary, and its inherent anxiety regarding issues and identities that have since gained more acceptance (though imperfectly) in today’s world. In this play, I have tried to access these issues through the Romantic vocabulary (linguistically and ideologically) in which they were written; the result for mlle. is a play in which the line between between performance and reality, masks and faces, then and now, is hopefully even more tenuous than it was in 1834.  –Isa St. Clair ’11 (April 2011)