playwright Archives | Research & Innovation

Bruce Jay Friedman plays published by 91��ɫ students

fmaquito — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Oscar-nominated screenwriter and accomplished American playwright Bruce Jay Friedman has a new collection of selected works coming out, and it’s being published by 91��ɫ’s Leaping Lion Books, which is run by students in the Professional Writing Program.

The launch of 3.1 Plays will take place Thursday, March 1, from noon to 3pm, at the Eleanor Winters Art Gallery, 129 Winters College, Keele campus. Friedman won’t be in attendance, but there will be a video message from him specially created for the occasion and 91��ɫ theatre students will perform excerpts from his book.

“Publishing an accomplished writer like Bruce Jay Friedman raises the profile of Leaping Lion Books,” says Alan Borenstein, Leaping Lion Books publisher and fourth-year professional writing student. “We’ve proven that we can work with any calibre of author, and put out a product worthy of your bookshelf.”

��峾��’s four works in 3.1 Plays are known for their sharp, black comedy and a punch of wit, and include the Obie award-winning play Scuba Duba: A Tense Comedy and Steambath. Both were off-Broadway hits. The other two plays in the collection are Sardines and The Trial. The plays are billed as capturing the surreal with a flair that is uncompromised by ��峾��’s ability to write real and flawed characters. His plays have delighted audiences since the 1960s and earned him rave reviews from The New 91��ɫ Times and The New 91��ɫer.

In addition to playwriting, Friedman has published six collections of stories, several novels, as well as a nonfiction collection. His novels include Stern (1962), A Mother’s Kisses (1964), The Dick (1970), The Current Climate (1989) and Violencia! (2002). A couple of his stories were also adapted for film – The Heartbreak Kid and The Lonely Guy.

Fourth-year students in the book stream of the Professional Writing Program of the Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, are required to take the Book Publishing Practicum course and participate in the publication of a real manuscript, such as ��峾��’s 3.1 Plays.

Bruce Jay Friedman

Just how the opportunity to publish ��峾��’s work came about was serendipitous. “When I was an editor at the University of Chicago Press, I published a collection of Bruce ��峾��’s essays titled Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos. We had been talking about another book, a collection of his plays, when I left Chicago in 2001,” says 91��ɫ English Professor Geoffrey Huck. “When a few years ago I put together Leaping Lion Books for the Book Publishing Practicum at 91��ɫ, I resurrected the idea with him, and he graciously agreed to let us publish.”

Friedman sent several plays and Huck chose four. “I wish we could have included more in the collection, but length – and hence cost – were considerations,” he says. “The students, along with course director Mike O’Connor, have done the rest. I hope other readers will find these plays as delightful as I have found them to be.”

Borenstein says the experience the publishing practicum provides is invaluable. “As jobs have become scarce for graduates in all fields, students are eager for a hands-on education and applicable skills. 91��ɫ’s publishing program simulates a professional working environment, in a program unique to Canada. With changes in how we read and receive information, the publishing industry is asking itself a lot of questions. We are the group of individuals who will provide the answers. That’s exciting.”

Having the opportunity to published ��峾��’s book means a lot, says Huck. “What I think Bruce’s and our other books prove is that the students in the Book Publishing Practicum are highly competent publishers. They are the future of book publishing, and they’re already showing their stripes.”

Everyone is invited to attend the launch. Refreshments will be provided and copies of the book will be available. There will also be a raffle courtesy of Leaping Lion Books sponsors for a chance to win gift certificates to the 91��ɫ Bookstore, gift certificates and merchandise from the Hard Rock Café, sunglasses from Anders & Flynt, tickets from Stage West Mississauga and a makeover from Kliks Beauty Centre. Sponsors also include the 91��ɫ Writing Department, Z-teca Gourmet Burritos, Blueberry Hill, ASRock America Inc. and NZXT Crafted Gaming Armor.

��峾��’s 3.1 Plays is available in print and in e-book format through Kobo Inc.

For more information about Leaping Lion Books, 3.1 Plays or Friedman, visit the Leaping Lion Books �ɱ��ٱ�.��

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Playwright and director to discuss his work tomorrow

fmaquito — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Alistair Newton, a Toronto-based playwright and director of theatre and opera, will digitally screen some of his work and engage in a discussion and Q&A tomorrow with film Professor Marie Rickard, the master of 91��ɫ’s Winters College.

The event, Queering Theatre in Toronto, will take place Thursday, from 2 to 4pm, in Winters Senior Common Room, 021 Winters College, Keele campus.

Newton, recently appointed a Winters College Fellow, is the founding artistic director of Ecce Homo Theatre. His newest musical, , is scheduled to run from Jan. 5 to 15, as part of the 2012 Next Stage Theatre Festival at the Factory Theatre in Toronto.

Written and directed by Newton, Loving the Stranger or How to Recognize an Invert, introduces the audience to Montreal’s Peter Flinsch, a theatre designer, visual artist and gay survivor of Nazi Germany, who was arrested in 1942 for kissing a friend at a Luftwaffe Christmas party. It takes in everything from the cabarets of 1920s Berlin and the battle over gay marriage to the office of the prime minister, and is billed as a provocative expressionist cabaret.

His previous work includes three consecutive productions for the SummerWorks Theatre Festival in which he was playwright and director of The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret, The Ecstasy of Mother Teresa or Agnes Bojaxhiu Superstar and Loving the Stranger or How to Recognize an Invert. Newton’s work has also been performed at the Rhubarb Festival – Leni Riefenstahl vs. the 20th Century – and the Victoria Fringe Festival – Woyzeck Songspiel.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Playwright discusses his recent work onstage in January

fmaquito — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Toronto-based playwright and director of theatre and opera, Alistair Newton will digitally screen some of his work and engage in a discussion and Q&A with film Professor Marie Rickard, the master of 91��ɫ’s Winters College, in January.

The event, Queering Theatre in Toronto, will take place Thursday, Jan 5, 2012, from 2 to 4pm in Winters Senior Common Room, 021 Winters College, Keele campus.

Right: Marie Rickard

Newton, a recently appointed Winters College Fellow, is the founding artistic director of Ecce Homo Theatre. His newest musical, , is scheduled to run from Jan. 5 to 15, 2012, as part of the 2012 Next Stage Theatre Festival at the Factory Theatre in Toronto.

Written and directed by Newton, Loving the Stranger or How to Recognize an Invert, introduces the audience to Montreal’s Peter Flinsch, a theatre designer, visual artist and gay survivor of Nazi Germany, who was arrested in 1942 for kissing a friend at a Luftwaffe Christmas party. It takes in everything from the cabarets of 1920s Berlin and the battle over gay marriage to the office of the Prime Minister, and is billed as a provocative expressionist cabaret.

“The goal of my work is to balance politics and entertainment, to combine dance, music, text and design into a total theatrical experience in the hopes of challenging my audience intellectually and emotionally,” says Newton.

“I agree with Schiller's notion of the stage as a moral institution and I endeavor to create work on big themes for troubled times. My output as a playwright and director with Ecce Homo Theatre seeks to achieve intimacy through artifice using a queer aesthetic as a tool for destabilization, to draw attention to hypocrisy and deflate the un-ironic. As one of my former teachers, Charles Marowitz, once said, “Laughter can be a hammer-stroke in the hands of deft satirists.”

Newton is a contributor to the forthcoming collection, TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work (Intellect Ltd.), edited by 91��ɫ theatre Professor Judith Rudakoff.

His previous work includes three consecutive productions for the SummerWorks Theatre Festival in which he was playwright and director of The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret, The Ecstasy of Mother Teresa or Agnes Bojaxhiu Superstar and Loving the Stranger or How to Recognize an Invert. Newton’s work has also been performed at the Rhubarb Festival – Leni Riefenstahl vs the 20th Century – and the Victoria Fringe Festival – Woyzeck Songspiel.

In addition, Newton was a participant in the inaugural presentation of The Ark at The National Arts Centre English Theatre in 2006, and is a past member of the BASH! Emerging Artist Program at the Canadian Stage Company, the Ante Chamber Creator’s Unit with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the Director’s Lab of the Lincoln Center Theater.

He has also served as apprentice director for the Ensemble Studio of the Canadian Opera Company for its 2009-2010 season, where he directed a production of Pergolisi’s La Serva Padonra. Newton’s recent work includes a stint as director/dramaturge for Bella: The Color of Love with Teresa Tova and Mary Kerr at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It was a commission for the 2011 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.

The show is being supported by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Next Stage Theatre Festival and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Four 91��ɫ professors elected to the Royal Society of Canada

fmaquito — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:00:00 +0000

The achievements of four 91��ɫ professors have been recognized by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), which has inducted them as Fellows.

Professor Pat Armstrong, a distinguished research professor of sociology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS); Professor Isabella Bakker in the Department of Political Science in LA&PS; Professor Rishma Dunlop in the Faculty of Education and in the Department of English in LA&PS; and Professor Bernard Lightman in the Department of Humanities, LA&PS, have all been inducted into the society as Fellows.

“On behalf of the 91��ɫ community, I would like to offer our sincere congratulations to four of our faculty members on being named as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,” said President & Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. “This prestigious recognition is well-deserved as Drs. Armstrong, Bakker, Dunlop and Lightman are leading scholars who have made outstanding contributions in research in their fields.”

The society has elected 78 new Fellows, including two Foreign Fellows, and one Honorary Fellow to its ranks for 2011. The newly elected Fellows will be officially inducted on Saturday, Nov. 26, during a ceremony at the Ottawa Convention Centre.

Election to the academies of the Royal Society of Canada is one of the highest honours awarded to Canadian scholars in the arts, humanities and sciences.

Pat Armstrong (right) is an internationally renowned sociologist with expertise in health care and women’s health, social policy, and gender and work. She has co-authored numerous books on health policy, including They Deserve Better: The Long-Term Care Experience in Canada and Scandinavia, Women’s Health: Intersections of Policy, Research and Practice, and Critical to Care: The Invisible Women in Health Services, among others. Armstrong is the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research and an executive member of both the 91��ɫ Institute for Health Research and the Graduate Program in Health Policy and Equity. She is the principal investigator for a major collaborative research initiative project titled “Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices,” which is funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Isabella Bakker (left) teaches International Political Economy, Women and Politics and Public Finance. A leading global expert in her field, Bakker’s research examines the interplay between feminist perspectives and international public policy, with a focus on how macroeconomics and fiscal policy affect questions of gender and social justice. Bakker’s published work includes: Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective, Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy, Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction and The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at 91��ɫ since 1986, and has held visiting professorships at the European University Institute in Florence, the University of California Santa Barbara and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, among other institutions. Bakker is a Trudeau Fellow and was named Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2004. She is the principal investigator of a SSHRC-funded project “Budgeting for Women’s Human Rights in Canada”.

Rishma Dunlop (right) is an award-winning Canadian poet, playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. She is founding editor of the international online literary journal Studio. Dunlop’s poetry collections include: White Album (2008), Metropolis (2005), Reading Like a Girl (2004) and The Body of My Garden (2002). Next month, her fifth book, Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems will be published. Known for her innovative research that merges scholarly inquiry with artistic production, Dunlop has taught interdisciplinary seminars on research and artistic creation for over a decade. In 2009 to 2010, she was awarded the prestigious Canada-US Fulbright Research Chair at the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She won the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry in 2003, and her non-fiction and poetry have been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards. She is currently principal investigator on the SSHRC research initiative on poetry of witness, human Rights and transitional justice. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, cross-appointed to 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Education and the Department of English, where she was coordinator of the Creative Writing program from 2007 to 2011.

Bernard Lightman (left) is an internationally renowned historian and currently the editor of Isis, the quarterly journal of the History of Science Society. He is also director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at 91��ɫ. Lightman’s area of expertise is the cultural history of Victorian science. He is editor of the Pickering and Chatto Press monograph series, titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century”, in which 14 books have been published. His publications include: The Origins of Agnosticism, Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain and Victorian Science in Context, among others. Currently, Lightman is working on a biography of the physicist John Tyndall, and he is the founder of an international correspondence project to collect and publish Tyndall’s letters. The project is being funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

For more information on the 2011 Fellows, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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