US Theatre Series

Confronting History - America before World War II - Three New Plays

Readings and Discussion

Please join us for an evening with playwrights Tanya Barfield (curator), Said Sayrafiezadeh, and Emily DeVoti, who will present their short plays and excerpts about American social crisis and change from the Civil War, Progressive Era, and World War I. A discussion will follow with Emily Morse and others. With additional support from New Dramatists, New York.

Tanya Barfield’s plays include: Blue Door (Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Seattle Repertory, Berkeley Repertory, Harare International Festival of the Arts, Zimbabwe), Dent, The Quick, The Houdini Act, and 121º West. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, and Geva Theatre Center. She is a member of New Dramatists. Her short play Medallion deals with the story of an African- American woman’s request for a Medal of Honor for her brother slain in the First World War.

Emily DeVoti's plays have been developed in NYC by New York Theater Workshop, Underwood Theatre, Cherry Lane Alternative, Six Figures, Judith Shakespeare Company, HotINK/NYU, and produced by New Georges and Shakespeare & Co. (Lenox, MA). Her play H/M will be produced in Fall 2007 by the Perry Street Theatre in Exile. She is the founding Theater Editor of The Brooklyn Rail and has an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU/Tisch. Beyond the Veil stages a fictitious meeting between novelist Edith Wharton and African American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois

Said Sayrafiezadeh’s essays and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Open City, Columbia Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. New York is Bleeding was commissioned by New York Theatre Workshop and developed at the Sundance Theatre Lab. He is currently at work on a memoir about growing up the son of an Iranian father and a Jewish-American mother, both of whom were members of a communist organization in the United States called the Socialist Workers Party. It will be published by Random House in fall 2008.

6:30 p.m., Thursday, May 17, 2007,
The Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free.

Confronting History - America before World War II - Three New Plays Readings and Discussion Please join us for an evening with playwrights Tanya Barfield (curator), Said Sayrafiezadeh, and Emily DeVoti, who will present their short plays and excerpts about American social crisis and change from the Civil War, Progressive Era, and World War I. A discussion will follow with Emily Morse and others. With additional support from New Dramatists, New York. Tanya Barfield’s plays include: Blue Door (Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Seattle Repertory, Berkeley Repertory, Harare International Festival of the Arts, Zimbabwe), Dent, The Quick, The Houdini Act, and 121º West. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, and Geva Theatre Center. She is a member of New Dramatists. Her short play Medallion deals with the story of an African- American woman’s request for a Medal of Honor for her brother slain in the First World War. Emily DeVoti's plays have been developed in NYC by New York Theater Workshop, Underwood Theatre, Cherry Lane Alternative, Six Figures, Judith Shakespeare Company, HotINK/NYU, and produced by New Georges and Shakespeare & Co. (Lenox, MA). Her play H/M will be produced in Fall 2007 by the Perry Street Theatre in Exile. She is the founding Theater Editor of The Brooklyn Rail and has an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU/Tisch. Beyond the Veil stages a fictitious meeting between novelist Edith Wharton and African American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois Said Sayrafiezadeh’s essays and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Open City, Columbia Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. New York is Bleeding was commissioned by New York Theatre Workshop and developed at the Sundance Theatre Lab. He is currently at work on a memoir about growing up the son of an Iranian father and a Jewish-American mother, both of whom were members of a communist organization in the United States called the Socialist Workers Party. It will be published by Random House in fall 2008. 6:30 p.m., Thursday, May 17, 2007, The Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free.
	Tanya Barfield Courtesy of the Artist	Said Sayrafiezadeh Photo © Karen Mainenti	Emily DeVoti Photo © M. Memran