Events

Past Events

Performance: Our Town

March 12, 2014 until April 6, 2014, Theater Latté Da, Minneapolis, MN

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For 75 years Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece has played a profound role in American culture. Theater Latté Da will honor the play’s 75th anniversary with a unique production. A multi-cultural cast of actor musicians become the citizens of Grover’s Corners as they fall in love, marry, confront mortality and all the while make music. Wilder’s profound look at ordinary people living ordinary lives has never been more extraordinary. Theater Latte Da’s production will include musical interludes by American masters of popular song such as Irving Berlin, Scott Joplin, Stephen Foster and Charles Ives.

Visit the Theater Latté Da website for more information

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Performance: Our Town

January 21, 2014 until February 9, 2014, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, KY

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Directed by Les Waters

Day in and day out, Grover’s Corners is Any Town, USA. The paper is delivered, the milkman visits, time passes and life continues. It is only when such routines are interrupted that the fleeting beauty of the everyday is brought more clearly into perspective. Join us as the Stage Manager guides us through this elegant portrait of the ordinary but remarkable joys and sorrows that define our lives. Our Town is the greatest American play celebrating the magic that makes a community.

For more information, please visit the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville website.

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Lecture: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: An Intimate Evening with Carol Channing & Justin Bond

January 20, 2014, The Town Hall, New York, NY

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Three-time Tony Award-winner Carol Channing will join queer icon and Tony Nominee Justin VivIan Bond in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: An Intimate Evening with Carol Channing and Justin VivIan Bond.

The event celebrates the 50th anniversary of Channing’s most identified role, Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello Dolly!, which debuted at the St. James Theatre on January 16, 1964. Hello, Dolly! is a musical based on Thornton Wilder’s 1955 farce, The Matchmaker.

On January 20th, the 92 year old veteran stage and screen actress will regale audiences with stories of her 70-plus years in show business, her upbringing in San Francisco and her numerous costars. Bond, recently hailed by New Yorker as “the greatest cabaret artist of her generation,” will open the show with a set of “love songs for Carol” before sitting down with Ms. Channing for a multimedia event featuring clips from her career, celebrity video clips and video questions which will be submitted in advance.

Muscial direction for Mx Bond by Lance Horne.

For more information, please visit The Town Hall’s website.

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Proposal Deadline: “Influence on/of Thornton Wilder”

January 15, 2014 January 25, 2014
Update: Deadline Extended until January 25, 2013

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In May 2014, The Thornton Wilder Society will once again take part in the American Literature Association Conference for a panel titled Influence on/of Thornton Wilder.

In conjunction with other drama/dramatist societies (Albee, ATDS, Glaspell, Miller, O’Neill, A. Wilson) the Thornton Wilder Society invites proposals for a panel on Thornton Wilder and his influences on other authors, or their influences on him. The society anticipates presentations on both Wilder’s influence on classical American playwrights (Williams, Miller, Inge, Albee, L. Wilson) but also more recent writers, such as Kushner, Vogel, Eno, and others. The society also welcomes papers on an author’s or movement’s influence on Wilder from any period or genre (Ancient Greek and Roman, Renaissance, Restoration, German Expressionism, Cubism, etc.).

Please send 300-word proposals, including name, academic affiliation, e-mail address, paper title, and abstract to:

Park Bucker, Ph.D.
Professor of English
University of South Carolina Sumter
psbucke@uscsumter.edu

Graduate students are encouraged to submit a proposal.

Deadline: January 15, 2014 January 25, 2013

The 25th annual American Literature Association Conference will be held May 22-25, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. For more information, please visit the American Literature Association’s 25th Annual Conference webpage.

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Lecture and Performance: The Long Christmas Dinner

December 10, 2013, Joe's Pub at The Public Theater, New York, NY

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A one-night-only reading at The Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub. The play will be read and discussed by actor/playwright Lisa Kron; media theorist Douglas Rushkoff; Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor, Tappan Wilder; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and CEO of the New America Foundation and author of the recent cover story in The Atlantic about trying to have it all; her son, Edward Moravcsik; and more.

For more information, please visit the Public Theater website.

About Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater
The Public Theater (Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis, Executive Director, Patrick Willingham) will kick off the fourth season of PUBLIC FORUM with the new series Drama Club, a book club for plays that will feature one-night-only readings and discussions of works by Kia Corthron, Tony Kushner and Thornton Wilder at Joe’s Pub. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, the popular PUBLIC FORUM series presents the theater of ideas: conversations and performances with leading voices in politics, media, and the arts.

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Performance: Our Planet

November 20, 2013 until December 8, 2013, Japan Society, New York, NY

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Within the halls of the Japan Society’s landmarked building in New York comes a new experience inspired by Wilder’s Pulitzer prize-winning play Our Town.

Of the infinite stars in the galaxy, a young boy fixates on one that is located ten-thousand light years away and has long perished by the time of the boy’s discovery. Imagine that at that same moment, the boy is actually an old man being watched by someone on a faraway star! Such are the mind-bending ideas whirling through Our Planet, a tale by the young Japanese playwright Yukio Shiba that juxtaposes the minutia of an average Japanese family’s life with the galactic events of the Earth’s birth and death. Inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Shiba’s Our Planet won the most prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2010. Performed in English.

The Japan Society’s Program Officer, Lara Mones, has stated that the creative team has “[…] decided to take the play out of the confines of our theater and have the audience actually travel with the actors around the various rooms of our landmarked building. We are really thrilled about the world premiere of this production.”

For performance times and other details, please visit the Japan Society’s website.

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Lecture and Signing: “An Evening with Penelope Niven”

November 12, 2013, Shirley Recital Hall, Elberson Fine Arts Center, Salem College, Winston-Salem, NC

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Contact Name: Gail Adams
Contact Phone : 336.917.5313

Reception and Book Signing will follow Penelope Niven’s Talk

Admission is free. No reservations are required.

Penelope Niven, the critically-acclaimed author of Carl Sandburg: a Biography; Steichen: a Biography; and Swimming Lessons, will return to Salem for the paperback release of Thornton Wilder: A Life, published by HarperCollins and praised by Edward Albee as “a splendid and long-needed work.” Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet, her biography for children, has been awarded an International Reading Association Prize “for exceptionally distinguished literature for children,” one of six books honored among publications from 99 countries. She is also co-author, with actor James Earl Jones, of Voices and Silences, praised as “a classic on acting.” Niven served as Salem College’s writer-in-residence for 12 years until her retirement. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Thornton Wilder Visiting Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale and was awarded the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor, for her work as a writer and a teacher.

For more information, please visit the event listing on the Salem College website.

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Book Release: Thornton Wilder: A Life (Paperback)

November 5, 2013

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“Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page.”
—James Earl Jones, actor

“Comprehensive and wisely fashioned….This book is a splendid and long needed work.”
—Edward Albee, playwright

Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the playwright and novelist since 1983, is based on unprecedented research: thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder’s life, work, and times. Biographer Penelope Niven mined Wilder’s personal archives for more than a decade, and has produced a book that illuminates his professional life anew and reveals an enigmatic, intensely private man who wandered the world, writing, he said, for and about everybody. Even today, he has a global audience. His novels, including The Bridge of San Luis Rey, remain in print all over the world. His plays, especially the iconic Our Town and the revolutionary Skin of Our Teeth, are touchstones of modern theater.

Richly detailed, Thornton Wilder: A Life brings one of our country’s most beloved playwrights to center stage and unseals his hidden inner self, apparent only here and there in his art and in his papers.

Visit the HarperCollins listing for Thornton Wilder: A Life for more information.

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