A presentation of the Padua Playwrights in conjunction with the 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). Free admission.
Henri Bergson described human intelligence as a spotlight accompanied by a fringe of instinct. In going from the human to the animal, we leave the light, pass through the penumbra, and then find ourselves in a dark - a dark what? These three plays ask what if animals could travel in the opposite direction, after watching us for a long time, from the dark to the light, with sudden access to human language? As an art-form involving high-level social collaboration, theater provides an ideal medium in which to probe the human-bee interspecies boundary. A collaboration with composer-musicians April Guthrie, Theo Goddell and Sarah Holtschlag and a gifted ensemble of performers, these three playful and darkly comedic plays make the theater space, at least temporarily, into a hive.
The three plays are:
PLAN B - Written and directed by Gray Palmer, with Alana Dietze and Max Faugno, original score composed by Gray Palmer, performed by Gray Palmer and April Guthrie. . . .
HELLO SAY - Written and directed by Guy Zimmerman, with Corryn Cummins and Gray Palmer, original score composed and performed by April Guthrie. . . .
AMBER - Written by Rachel Jendrzejewski and directed by Laurie Woolery, with Alana Dietze and Corryn Cummins, original score composed by Theo Goddell and Sarah Holtschlag.
"The Padua playwrights embody a true voice of Los Angeles as much as Steppenwolf embodies a voice of Chicago."
–Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly Theater Critic
SLSA13 is sponsored by the University of Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters; the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values; The Department of English; The Department of Art, Art History & Design; The College of Science; The Center for Social Concerns; and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics.