From Moderator Phillip Freeman:
“The stage of Titus is awash with blood and body parts. Murder and mutilation, rape and cannibalism, ritual sacrifice and assassination. What is going on? What echoes do we hear in the world around us? What is being presented or represented by the carnage? Is it a picture of death? Things falling apart? Is it a sorry portrait of human nature unbound? Is it simply journalism?
How does the modern director approach the dramatization of slaughter? To what extent will the violence be enacted, to what extent will it be expressed or distanced by language? How do we, as the audience, respond? With what degree of excitement, guilt, revulsion or nervous laughter?
These are some of the questions we will examine through scenes from Titus Andronicus and discussion with a panel of very special guests.
Light refreshments will be served.”
Panelists:
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of two novels and four non-fiction books, including Without Apology: Girls, Women and the Desire to Fight, a New York Times Notable Book. Her new novel, House Lights, will be published in July.
Phillip Freeman, M.D., is a psychiatrist and Training and Supervising psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He has faculty appointments at the Boston University and Harvard Medical Schools. He writes about psychoanalytic subjects and discusses and consults to productions of films and plays in the Boston area.
David R. Gammons is the director of Titus Andronicus, was scenic and costume designer for ASP’s King Lear, and is the director of the theatre program at Concord Academy.
Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and Language and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Garber is the author of four widely admired books on Shakespeare, including her most recent, Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004), which received the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from Phi Beta Kappa.
Sandra McCroom is the Executive Director of Roxbury Youthworks, Inc. where she works to continue the organization’s 25-year history of providing innovative support and wrap-around services to court-involved and other youth and their families in the Greater Boston area.
Tina Packer, one of the country’s foremost experts on Shakespeare and theatre arts, created Shakespeare & Company in 1978, the goal of which is to be an American Shakespeare company of the highest standard that holds language at the center of the theatrical experience.
Samantha Power is The Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Powers’ New Yorker article on the horrors in Darfur, Sudan won the 2005 National Magazine Award for best reporting.