Posted in events, play, tagged A Knife in the Whale, Virginia Woolf play on Tuesday 14 May 2013| Leave a Comment »
A Knife in the Whale, a play writtenb by Liz Jardine-Smith and directed by Dominique Gerrard, explores the links between Virginia Woolf’s creativity and her mental state.
It will be on stage for one night only, May 31, at Compass Theatre, Glebe Avenue, Ickenham, London. It is part of Hillingdon Artsweek 2013. Additional performances may be added later, according to the author.
Posted in play, Susan Sellers, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, tagged Moving Stories Theatre, Riverside Studios, Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia, Virginia Woolf play on Wednesday 27 March 2013| Leave a Comment »
Susan Sellers, author of the novel Vanessa and Virginia, is spreading the news via Facebook that the Moving Stories Theatre
production of the eponymous play based on her novel is sold-out for its current three-week run.
Written by Dr. Elizabeth Wright, the play is on stage at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London, through April 14.
Read more about it — and Susan Sellers:
A screen shot of Susan Sellers’ Facebook post about “Vanessa and Virginia”
Posted in play, tagged Arthur Kraft, Elite Theatre Co., Goat, Virginia Woolf play on Tuesday 26 April 2011| 4 Comments »
The Elite Theatre Company will present the world premiere of Arthur Kraft’s drama “Goat,” about what might have happened if a psychologist had prevented writer Virginia Woolf from committing suicide in 1941.
Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sundays, fronm April 22 through May 29 at the Petit Playhouse, Heritage Square, Oxnard, Calif.
Tickets are $17 for adults and $15 for seniors and students. For reservations, call 805-483-5118.
Posted in 21st century Woolf, A Room of One's Own, play, reviews, tagged New York Women's Project, Patricia Laurence, Room, Virginia Woolf play on Saturday 26 March 2011| Leave a Comment »
Lauren "projecting a stillness of mind"
Imagine a string of pearls–“moments of being”–from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and A Sketch of the Past strung together in a dramatic adaptation. This is the experience of attending Room, an admirable production mounted by the New York Women’s Project, under the direction of Ann Bogart, and adapted from Woolf’s works by Jocelyn Clarke.
These “moments” are a part of Woolf’s philosophy that a great part of our everyday life is lived as “non-being,” or what she calls the “cotton wool” of ordinary experience. But “one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does,” asserts Woolf, and behind “the cotton wool” of the every day is a hidden pattern. This pattern is revealed in exceptional and infrequent “illuminations, matches struck in the dark,” moments of being.
It is these moments that are revisited in Room a praiseworthy effort to bring Virginia Woolf’s words and advice about writing and reading to broader audiences–though the night I attended, the words were addressed to, mostl,y a room of women.
Though imaginatively choreographed by Ellen Lauren and Ann Bogart—at times, almost a dance of the body to accompany the dance of Woolf’s mind–this production misses the mark. In transforming Woolf’s writing into a dramatic production, it ignores her philosophy and her own pattern of narration—that moments of being are embedded in the ordinary cotton wool of experience and, therefore, shine all the brighter when they occur.
In this production, moments and polemics combine and are too densely packed to have their effect. Where, one wonders, is the cotton wool, the ordinary stuff of life, to buffer and frame these moments in the experience of the theatergoer? This is not just Woolf’s philosophy but also a principle of drama.
The production begins with Virginia Woolf among us: “Good Evening,” says the cool voice of Ellen Lauren, as she makes her way down the aisle to the stage, tall and lean as Woolf. She asks us to “Imagine a room, your own….” and the stage for the next ninety minutes becomes that material and inner room of the mind so important to women and fiction. It is a room with a closed door that invites women to write.
Originally A Room of One’s Own was a lecture delivered to the women of Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge University, in 1928– the year full equal voting rights would be extended to women in England—and then published in written form, 1929. Given the times, Woolf is always self-conscious about tone as she weaves her arguments against the exclusion of women from education, jobs and the material conditions necessary to the writing of fiction. Sensitive always to how the male audience would “hear” and be persuaded by her lecture—Woolf works by stealth and indirection in arguing and avoids stridency of tone. At times, in Bogart’s production this tone is violated, absorbing didacticism and assertiveness from another time and place.
Nevertheless, we listen attentively to the flight of Woolf’s mind, and her reflections on “what is meant by reality”; how the writer has “a shock-receiving capacity”; the “moments of being” of appreciating a flower “that is the whole” or experiencing revulsion at violence. And, importantly, in portraying Woolf in this production, how memoirs too often are failures because they say, “this is what happened” but “they leave out the person to whom things happened.” In finale, it is asserted that “you cannot write without a room of your own,” and money, a material condition that Woolf would have added to this production.
There were some wonderful moments in this production where Ellen Lauren captured the rapture and the waves in the synchrony of Woolf’s words and her body. What is intriguing about this production is that the actress, and Ann Bogart, the director and founder of the SITI theater company with Tadashi Suzuki, studied photographs of Woolf and created a lexicon of physical structures, what they term “a sort of alphabet.”
As the words of Woolf unfolded during the production, there was a physical score, so that at one moment, we observe Lauren bent sideward over a chair, magically not touching it, and projecting a stillness of mind. At another time, she dances the rapture of Woolf’s words. It is this–the choreography of words, mind and body that speaks to a new kind of acting and direction in Woolf productions (and, hopefully, productions that will involve astute Woolf critics and scholars in the process).
For those living in NYC, there are two more days–through Sunday, March 27—to see this production.
Posted in play, tagged Room, SITI Company, Virginia Woolf play, Women's Project on Friday 11 March 2011| 2 Comments »
The Women’s Project is offering Blogging Woolf readers big savings on tickets to Room, the one-woman show based on the writings of Virginia Woolf and starring SITI Company’s Ellen Lauren.
The acclaimed production is on stage at the Julia Miles Theater in New York City March 12-27.
The $60 tickets are discounted to $30 for Women’s Project Friends — and Blogging Woolf readers are included in that group — by following the directions below. You can order tickets three different ways.
Thanks to theater manager Monet Hurst-Mendoza for offering this generous discount.
For more details about the production, read our previous post, Woolf’s Room on stage in NY March 12-27.
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