Double Double: Radcliffe Public Lecture

Next month, I'm giving my Radcliffe Fellow presentation at the Knafel Center, where I will be discussing the work I've been doing during my Radcliffe year and presenting excerpts from two works-in-progress (as well as a surprise at the end). My primary project this year has been a play I'm calling Double Double,  an exploration of folkloric witches, 21st century feminism and female spaces. The other project is a play about the dangers women face in their engagements with men and the role of unthinkability in the restructuring of the narrative of self. 

Details:
The Knafel Center, Radcliffe Yard
April 12, 4pm
Light refreshments immediately following

Updated 4/20/2017
Because my presentation couldn't be filmed (I incorporated readings of works-in-progress with actors), here is an excerpt from the text of my lecture: 

This year, I worked on two plays. One is a play about witches, and the other play that isn’t about witches but I wrote it while I was consuming all of that material about witches. So both plays to me are influenced by this research about witches, overtly and less overtly. I think a lot about one particular quote from Stacy Schiff’s book “The Witches: Salem 1692,” which came out a couple years ago, in which she says “Though confined to the home, women were the geographically mobile ones in New England; they were the strangers who came to town.” That quote was hugely inspirational for both scripts I worked on this year. In both plays, the main characters are women who have come to town, who are outsiders and strangers, suspicious and suspect. I like the conflict inherent in that quote’s portrayal of women as both housebound and wandering—you can expand that metaphorically as well, this idea of ambivalence as it pertains to one’s self-identity in relation to one's perceived role in society and to one's individuality.

Both plays are deeper investigations of the kind of work I’ve done for the past ten years which has become more and more about highly naturalistic, subtle portrayals of women in specific settings—geographical or situational. This is the small niche I'm working in, but theater can be anything. A play can be about a post-apocalyptic world where characters are buried in sand and our hero is the personification of fear and everyone speaks in monologues to the audience. Naturalism, which I focus on, is different. Naturalism is similar to what other art forms call realism. Naturalism is directly representational. A room is a room, a mother is a mother, animals are played by animals and people are played by people.

I consider my work to be hyper-naturalistic, which takes the properties of naturalism in theater—realistic dialogue, familiar settings, a close study of human behavior and psychology—and combines these with a realistic rendering of the passing of time. Many of my plays start well before the action of the drama begins, and often the scenes continue for a while after a big reveal or after the crux of a scene is accomplished. I do this because I’m interested in the particular rhythms of conversation, of specific locations, of certain types personalities, of different kinds of families, etc. When you consider time and rhythm as components with equal importance to character and action, you can create a sort of eeriness that functions particularly well in theater. While my plays are feminist for many reasons, I consider prioritizing these two properties of theater a feminist act as well. Doing this subverts the traditional and masculine structure of theater, upending rules about drama that go all the way back to Aristotle.