| Students in a playwriting class this month at Berea College
are writing and will perform plays they have written based
on research on their own family histories.
The original plays will be presented on the evenings of Jan.
24 and 26-27, beginning at 7 p.m. in the Musser Theatre of
the Jelkyll Drama Center. A "staff matinee" will
be offered at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25, with no evening
performance on that date. Performance time is approximately
45 minutes with no intermission.
Admission is free and no tickets are required. Seating will
be on a first come, first served basis.
The course is being taught during Berea's January short term
by assistant professor of English and theatre Dr. Albert DeGiacomo
and playwright Arthur Giron, Aronson Artist in Residence during
January 2001.
The students were selected months before the course began,
giving them the opportunity to interview their parents and
grandparents and to dig not their family archives and attics
in an effort to explore the dramatic question that forms the
basis of the plays: "What were my grandparents like when
they were my age?"
Professor Emeritus Arthur Giron, the former fourteen-year
head of the Graduate Playwriting Program at Carnegie Mellon
University, is the author of eleven plays: Edith Stein (1969,
1988), Money (1976), Dirty Jokes or Scouts Honor (1976), Innocent
Pleasures (1978), Becoming Memories (1981), Charley Bacon and
His Family (1985), A Dream of Wealth (1992) and Boy Dies Dancing
Mambo (1996), a revision of Money. Flight, a play about the
Wright brothers, was presented in New York in November 1997
at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, of which Giron is a founding
member.
Giron completed a Hispanic version of The Cherry Orchard,
titled The Coffee Trees, which received its premiere at Berea
College in February 2000. His most recent work is Moving Bodies,
funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as a
result of Giron's play about the Wright brothers, concerns
Nobel Prize (1965) physicist Richard Feynman who helped develop
the atom bomb. It received its premiere at the Ensemble Studio
Theater in April 2000 as part of the First Light Festival in
New York City.
Other recent New York productions of his work include Boy
Dies Dancing Mambo at the H.[agen] B. [erghof] Theatre in 1998
and A Dream of Wealth at Urban Stages. He is currently at work
on a bi-lingual opera, titled The Golden Guitar, commissioned
by the Metropolitan Opera Guild educational wing.
Giron resides in New York City with his wife, Mariluz.
CONTACT: Dr. Albert DeGiacomo at (859) 985-3326 for additional
information and interviews.
|
