“Vita and Virginia,” Eileen Atkins‘s adaptation of the letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West will be on stage Feb. 11 through April 28 at the Zipper Factory, a theater pub located at 336 W. 37th St. in New York.
Kathleen Chalfant and Patricia Elliott star in the production. It will be staged by the No Frills Theatre Company, dedicated to producing plays with roles for women over 40, after a two-performance run in Tucson, Arizona, last month.
Performances are Mondays at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35. For tickets or more information, call 212-352-3101.
For dinner reservations at the Zipper Factory Tavern, call 212-695-4600. The box office opens two hours prior to curtain.
Award-winning actress Atkins starred with Vanessa Redgrave in the original Off-Broadway production of “Vita & Virginia.”
Virginia Woolf gave us the print version. The BBC gave us the audio version. Now New York’s Lincoln Center presents the multi-media version of The Waves.
The New York Times reports that Woolf’s experimental 1931 novel is the basis for one of three offbeat programs Lincoln Center will present as part of its New Visions: Literary Muse series during its 2008-2009 season.
All three will combine the spoken word, music and multimedia elements on stage.
Presented by the National Theater of Britain, “Waves” merges theatrics and technology by using four cameras and overlapping projectors to present multiple images on stage at once. The only non-live element is the recurring image of breaking waves.
It’s all part of the National Theatre’s attempt to make theatre more interesting and relevant to 21st century audiences.
The other two offerings in the Lincoln Center Literary Muse series are “Kafka Fragments” by Gyorgy Kurtag and directed by Peter Sellars and “Don Quijote de la Mancha: Romances y Músicas,” presented by Jordi Savall and the groups Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, the Times reports.
“Waves” will premiere in the U.S. on Nov. 12 at 8 p.m. and run through Nov. 22 at the Duke on 42nd Street.
“Waves” was on stage at the National Theatre in 2006 and will reportedly return there this August. Listen to the podcast with director Katie Mitchell.
Writing for publication requires a certain amount of talent, along with persistence, drive and ego. Thus, many writers are complicated and competitive people. Virginia Woolf was no exception.
That’s why the current discussion on the VW Listserv, which involves what is often described as “the rivalry” between Woolf and James Joyce, is worth reporting. It shows her as the complex, multi-dimensional person she was.
I believe it is important, however, to place Woolf’s musings about Joyce within the context of women’s history. For it is that context that helps frame her response to him and his art.
As postings to the list have mentioned, Woolf’s comments about Joyce were not consistent. Sometimes she praised him; sometimes she criticized him. Both her praise and her criticism could be extreme, colored by intense feeling.
Federico Sabatini, who describes himself as a young Joyce scholar who has devoted five years to studying and writing about the Irish author, quotes these words of self-deprecating praise from Woolf in her letters: “what she was attempting was probably being better done by mr joyce.”
Robert Ireland focuses on Woolf’s harsh criticism of Joyce and turns her class consciousness — for which she is often criticized — against her. From a Diary entry of 16 August 1922, he quotes Woolf as describing Ulysses as an “illiterate, underbred book … of a self taught working man.”
Another poster to the list named Simon contributed a raft of quotes, including this one from Woolf’s 6 September 1922 Diary entry, which mixes the weakest praise with the strongest disgust: “I finished Ulysses, & think it a misfire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense.”
That same month, in two other diary entries, Woolf admits that by not reading the work carefully, she had probably “scamped the virtue of it,” and that she had her “back up on purpose” against Joyce’s experimental novel.
I think we need to be aware of more than Woolf’s class consciousness and competitive spirit about her writing. We also need to remember that in 1922, she was an anomaly. She was a woman writing in a man’s world.
Consider the following:
In 1922, British men still ruled England, despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of a million of them were slaughtered on the World War I battlefront while women proved their mettle on the home front.
In 1922, women in England had only been able to vote for four years. But even then, not all adult women had that right. Younger women — age 21 to 30 — were not given the franchise until 1928.
In 1922, it had only been two years since a woman had been admitted to Oxford University as the first full degree candidate.
And in 1922, the equal pay for women clause of the Treaty of Versailles had been universally ignored for three years.
No wonder, then, that Woolf — always painfully aware of the power of the patriarchy — refused to fall into line with male critics such as T.S. Eliot, who offered effusive praise of Joyce’s new novel as being “extremely brilliant.”
Instead, she stood firm in her own views. As she wrote in her diary regarding a conversation with Eliot about Joyce’s novel, “I kept myself from being submerged, though feeling the waters rise once or twice…had I been meek, I suppose I should have gone under — felt him & his views dominant & subversive.”
As Woolf scholar Mark Hussey put it, “In 1922 Ulysses was certainly a song heard loud and clear, with the potential of drowning out others” (Virginia Woolf A-Z 134).
Woolf, who shared the year of her birth and the year of her death with Joyce, refused to be submerged.
For more on Joyce and Woolf, read Bonnie Kime Scott, specifically the following works:
New Alliances in Joyce Studies: “Whan it’s Aped to Foul a Delfian,”
Editor Newark: University of Deleware Press, 1988. The 1985 Joyce Symposium proceedings, with critical introduction and selections on Recent Theory, Forms in Fiction, Analogies from Art, Feminist Revisions, Joyce and Other Women Writers, Influences and Resonances, and Textual Workshops.
James Joyce:Harvester Feminist Readings Series. London: Harvester Press, 1987.
“A Joyce of One’s Own.” Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Lisa Rado. New York: Garland P, 1994. 209-230.
For the 18th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Pat Colliers is seeking papers for a panel that looks at ways of bringing the insights and methodologies of recent work in early 20th century periodical studies to bear on the life and work of Virginia Woolf.
The conference, with the theme “Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf,” will be held June 19–22, 2008, at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado.
According to Colliers, possibilities for the periodicals panel include papers on the following topics:
Woolf’s contributions to periodicals as an essayist, short story writer, or reviewer
Woolf’s interventions in contemporary debates about journalism and the public sphere
reviews of Woolf and her circle as evidence of “reception.”
“In any case,” Colliers writes, “papers should engage with periodicals as texts in themselves that bring their own problematics of interpretation and methodology, not primarily as “contexts” or neutral containers of content.”
Send 250-word abstracts and brief bios to Patrick Collier at pccollier@bsu.edu by Jan. 5, 2008.
This news, posted on the MLA listserv, was sent out to the VW Listserv from Helen Southworth.
