Showing posts with label Harry Ransom Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Ransom Center. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Tiffany Stern Lectures on 'Der Bestrafte Brudermord,' at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, January 16, 2014


Tiffany Stern (image via Hidden Room Theatre)
Tiffany Stern (image via Hidden Room Theatre)
Join The Hidden Room in welcoming scholar/superhero Tiffany Stern to Austin! She'll be speaking as the honored Thomas Cranfill Lecturer on the mysterious Der Bestrafte Brudermord, and why it might, or might not be a puppet show. Absolutely free, and completely priceless. Don't miss this wildly influential and delightful individual.

Many thanks to the UT English Department for their kind sponsorship of this event.

Tiffany Stern is a Professor of Early Modern Drama (English Faculty), and Beaverbrook and Bouverie Fellow in English (University College) at Oxford University.

Tiffany specialises in Shakespeare, theatre history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, book history and editing. Her work arises from an interest in the contexts that shaped the ways playwrights wrote and actors performed. Her first book was Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan; her second book, Making Shakespeare, focused on Shakespeare’s London, actors, theatres, props and music. Both books are used by theatre companies interested in experimenting with ‘original’ methods of Shakespearean production. Shakespeare in Parts, a book she co-wrote with fellow Oxford faculty member Simon Palfrey, concentrates on Shakespeare as a playwright and actor performing from, and writing for, 'parts' (the texts actors received, consisting of cues and speeches, nothing else). Combining Simon’s expertise as an interpreter and Tiffany’s as a theatre historian, it is a work that takes its interpretative momentum from archival research to discover not only a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but also a new Shakespeare. It is complemented by Documents of Performance in Shakespearean England, which considers the other papers of performance not examined in 'Parts': plot-scenarios, playbills, arguments, prologues, songs, scrolls and backstage-plots.

Tiffany is also an editor, and has produced editions of the anonymous King Leir, Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer.


Monday, March 19, 2012

Shakespeare Scholar James Shapiro Speaks at the Ransom Center, University of Texas, on Thursday, March 22


James Shapiro, William ShakespeareShakespeare scholar at Columbia University and author of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 [click for ALT review], speaks Thursday night, March 22, at the Ransom Center about Shakespeare’s “life” as currently written. The program will be webcast live at 7 p.m. CST.

Shapiro specializes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture and is also the author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare.

The Harry Ransom Center is at 21st St. and Guadalupe on the University of Texas campus (click for map). Please be aware that the Ransom Center's Charles Nelson Prothro Theater has limited seating. Line forms upon arrival of the first patron, and doors open 30 minutes in advance.

Click to read a brief interview of Shapiro by Kelsey McKinney, published by the Ransom Center's website Cultural Compass, March 19

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Arts Reporting: Terry Teachout Reports That Ransom Center Has A Recording of Laurette Taylor Reprising Performance as the Original Amanda Wingfield


Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield (image via artsjournal.com)Author and Wall Street Journal theatre critic Terry Teachout reports the discovery in his article "A Sighting of the Grail" in this blog About Last Night (dated tomorrow) on ArtsJournal.com. An excerpt:


Over the weekend I received the following e-mail from Reva Cooper, a New York-based arts publicist:

In 2005, you wrote about a Laurette Taylor recording from The Glass Menagerie, and asked if anyone knew where to locate it. I'd heard about it, too, saw your entry on a search about it, and am writing to tell you that I located the recording and just heard it at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The librarian said that due to copyright restrictions, she wasn't allowed to put it online, so you have to go there to hear it....

The recording you're interested in is called We, the People, and is an awards ceremony where [Taylor] is honored by a journalism association. As part of the event she reads scenes from Peg o' My Heart, Outward Bound, and The Glass Menagerie, and discusses her preparation for each of these roles (the scenes aren't listed, and I just wrote to the librarian in followup to suggest that they be added to the index title, to make it easier to locate).

Her Amanda is fascinating, not at all like later Amandas I've seen, much more hardscrabble working class, living in the present in St. Louis, playing against the memory--but suddenly she remembers...and that's the surprise--much more realistic. And her accent is a bit more lower-class Southern than other actresses have used--she said she copied Tennessee Williams' accent.

This is--to put it very mildly--staggering news.

Playbill, Glass Menagerie (via artsjournal.com)Patricia Neal, who saw Taylor play Amanda Wingfield on Broadway, said in Broadway: The Golden Age that she gave "the greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life." According to Harold Prince, "I knew when I watched it, and I sat in the balcony, you'll never see greater acting as long as you live." Seeing as how countless other theater professionals who saw Laurette Taylor's Amanda in the theater have said pretty much the same thing, I can't imagine another hitherto-unknown archival document that would be of more compelling interest to scholars and aficionados of American theater in the twentieth century than a sound recording of Taylor reading a fragment of The Glass Menagerie, however brief. Would that I were in a position to catch the next plane to Austin!


Click to read the full article at ArtsJournal.com . . . .

Friday, October 28, 2011

Upcoming: René Auberjonis Reads Smut for the Harry Ransom Center, November 3


Received directly:

Harry Ransom Center University of Texas




presents

A 'Smut' Sampler

A Light-Hearted Reading of Selections from Some Notorious Banned Books

René Auberjonois in The Imaginary Invalid (Washington Shakespeare, 2008 - photo by Carol Rosegg)by René Auberjonois and Kristen Vangsness

hosted by Isaiah Sheffer in connection with the exhibition 'Burned, Banned, Seized and Censored'

Thursday, November 3, 7 p.m. -- free admission

Jessen Auditorium, Homer Raney Hall, 21st St. (click for map)

VIEW A LIVE WEBCAST of this event starting at approximately 7 p.m. CST on Thursday, November 3.

The Ransom Center presents an evening with Isaiah Sheffer as he hosts readings from works featured in the exhibition Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored in Jessen Auditorium at The University of Texas at Austin.


Banned Books Harry Ransom CenterxA 'Smut' Sampler: A Light-Hearted Reading of Selections from Some Notorious Banned Books features actors René Auberjonois and Kristen Vangsness. They will read from works including Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, Jurgen, and Tropic of Cancer.


Heard on public radio stations across America, Sheffer is co-founder and artistic director of Symphony Space and director and host of Selected Shorts. Tony Award–winning actor Auberjonois has acted in a variety of theater productions, films, and television programs, including Benson, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Practice, Judging Amy, and Frasier. Vangsness currently stars in Criminal Minds and Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior.


The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited. Line forms upon arrival of the first patron, and doors open 30 minutes in advance. This program will be webcast live.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Interview: Tony Kushner Talks about Tennessee Williams, Ransom Center Blog

Published at Cultural Compass, the blog of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, May 19:

Q and A: Playwright Tony Kushner speaks about influence of Tennessee Williams

Tony Kushner chats with students after a public program during a visit in 2006.In light of the Ransom Center’s current exhibition Becoming Tennessee Williams, Cultural Compass spoke with Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner about Tennessee Williams’s legacy. Read a transcript of the interview with Kushner, in which he discusses how Williams has influenced him, his first encounter with Williams’s works, Williams’s courageousness, and more.

How has Tennessee Williams influenced you?

Profoundly. Of the three major, post-war American playwrights—Williams, Miller, and O’Neill—I had the easiest time connecting to Tennessee when I was young and starting to think about being a playwright. When I read A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, I fell in love with Tennessee because he was a southern writer and I grew up in Louisiana. The voice was very familiar and powerful to me because he was gay. Even though there were no overtly gay characters, you could feel issues of sexuality that seemed of great moment to me right under the surface of the plays.

Williams, much more than any other American playwright, succeeded in finding a poetic diction for the stage. I immediately identified with that ambition, with the desire to write language that simultaneously sounded like spontaneous utterance but also had the voluptuousness in daring, peculiarity, quirkiness, and unapologetic imagistic density of poetry. Also because it is a written language, the tension between artifice, naturalism, and spontaneity in art has always been exciting to me. I felt that I experienced it really viscerally in terms of American playwriting first in Tennessee’s writing.

[Image: Tony Kushner meets students during a 2006 visit to the Harry Ransom Center ]

Read full interview at the Ransom Center's blog Cultural Compass . . . .

Monday, February 28, 2011

Upcoming: John Lahr Lectures on Tennessee Williams and the Out-crying Heart, Harry Ransom Center, UT, March 3

Found on-line:

Tennessee Williams (online image not attributed)

Tennessee Williams and the Out-Crying Heart

a lecture by New Yorker drama critic John Lahr

March 3, 7 p.m.

Homer Rainey Hall music building, University of Texas

21st St., east of Guadalupe and east of Ransom Center (click for map)

no charge for admission


Homer Rainey Hall, 21st St., University of TexasThe University Co-op presents the Harry Ransom Lectures event "Tennessee Williams and the Out-Crying Heart” with John Lahr, Senior Drama Critic of The New Yorker. The event takes place Thursday, March 3, at 7 p.m. in Jessen Auditorium in Homer Rainey Hall.

Lahr will discuss the origins of Tennessee Williams's dramatic voice and how it changed over the decades.


Members of the Harry Ransom Center receive complimentary parking and priority entry at this program. Doors open at 6:20 p.m. for members and at 6:30 p.m. for the general public. Members must present their membership cards for priority entrance; one seat per membership card. Members arriving after 6:30 p.m. will join the general queue. Complimentary parking for members is available at the University Co-op garage at 23rd and San Antonio streets.


The Harry Ransom Lectures honor former University of Texas Chancellor Harry Huntt Ransom and highlight the Ransom Center’s vital role in the University’s intellectual and cultural life. The program brings internationally renowned writers, artists, and scholars to Austin for public events and conversations with University students. The lectures are made possible by the generous support of the University Co-op.


Additional support was provided by the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Book Recommendation: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro (courtesy of the Ransom Center and Penelope Lively)



In its "Cultural Compass" blog entry of September 21, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas passes along the responses of its prominent supporters to the invitation, "Name the book of the decade."

Novelist Penelope Lively, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center, responded,

I like books that leave me better informed, that surprise me, that change my view. James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare did all that. I suppose that I held—vaguely—the Coleridgean view that Shakespeare transcends his age "as if of another planet." Shapiro demonstrates with elegance and authority how the work of that year—Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, first draft of Hamlet—sprang directly from the action and the anxieties of the age: the war in Ireland, the fear of the Spanish, the question of the succession, and the possibility of Elizabeth's assassination.

[1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, Harper Collins, Harper Perennial Library, 2005, ISBN 978-0060088743]

Friday, March 5, 2010

Arts Reporting: Backlash for Upcoming David Mamet Visit


MFA Playwriting candidate Diana Grisanti as a guest commentator on the blog "The Deportee's Wife" attacks the decision of the Ransom Center to host David Mamet for small session workshops with students on March 9-10. She asserts that during a seminar last year Mamet used "hate speech" against Muslims, Arabs and women. UT faculty commented in reply to messages from her and others that student applications for the seminar outran spaces available by 10 to 1.

Excerpt from Grisanti's four-paragraph article of March 5:

Since we have not been heard at UT, we’d like the greater theatre community to know what’s up. Critics of Mamet’s plays and books often chock up the playwright’s incendiary remarks to a bad boy desire to get a rise out of people. I’d like to take it upon myself to excise the euphemisms. David Mamet is a racist and a misogynist, both in his work and his life. Many have forgiven Mamet because of his talent, but his skills as a dramatist have let him get away with murder–literally, if you take into account that hate speech leads to the normalization of bigotry which leads to the waging of foreign wars.

Read full article at the blog "The Deportee's Wife"

[photo: Brigitte Lacombe]

Monday, March 1, 2010

Education: David Mamet Small Seminars at UT, March 9-10


From the Ransom Center, relayed in a tweet on March 1:

UT Students: Apply to participate in seminar with playwright, writer, and director David Mamet

The Harry Ransom Center is pleased to provide current University of Texas at Austin graduate and undergraduate students with the opportunity to join playwright, writer, and director David Mamet on “A Journey Towards Meaning.”

The Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum, is home to David Mamet’s archive, which is open and available for use.

Mr. Mamet will meet with 10 students 1-4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9 and 1-4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10. Students must be available on both days in order to participate. The Ransom Center encourages students to consult with their professors before missing class to participate in this seminar.

Currently enrolled University of Texas at Austin students should submit no more than TWO LINES explaining why they should be chosen to mametseminar@gmail.com. Entries longer than two lines will not be considered.

Entries must be received by March 2, 2010. Selected students will be notified by March 4, 2010.

The Ransom Center cannot offer further guidance about entries.

[photo of David Mamet by Brigitte Lacombe]

Monday, September 14, 2009

Upcoming: Poe's Tell-Tale Heart and other works performed by Lucien Douglas, Harry Ransom Center, October 15


Received directly:

In connection with the Harry Ransom Center's exhibition From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe (September 8, 2009 - January 3, 2010)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" and other selections from the works of Edgar Allan Poe

performed by Lucien Douglas

Thursday, October 15 at 7:00 PM
Prothro Theatre of the Harry Ransom Research Center
University of Texas at Austin

Also as a live webcast of this event starting at approximately 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 15