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Nanette Shaw
Celebrated theatre director Andrei Serban will join leading Shakespeare scholar Stephen Booth at a conference on Hamlet at The City University of New York Graduate Center on May 5, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.. The free, public conference will be held at Elebash Recital Hall at The Graduate Center’s new campus at 365 Fifth Avenue. For further information, call 1-212-817-8215. Titled "‘Th’Observed of All Observers’: New Perspectives on Hamlet," the conference will bring together Serban, fresh from his much-lauded production of Hamlet at the Public Theater, and Berkeley professor Booth, author of such works as An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy in an examination of Hamlet from the perspective of both practitioner and scholar. Serban’s address will be entitled "Visualizing Hamlet," and Booth’s lecture is called "O, What a Rogue and Peasant Slave." Kate D. Levin, Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, will serve as a respondent "Both Serban and Booth have a common affinity for exploring the violation of expectations in Shakespeare," notes conference organizer Richard C. McCoy, Professor of English at The Graduate Center and Queens College. Serban, was born in Romania and trained at the Theatre and Film Institute of Bucarest. He directed widely in Eastern Europe before coming to the United States in 1970, making his debut at the La Mama theatre with a production of Arden of Faversham (a work sometimes wrongly attributed to Shakespeare). Serban went on to become known as a highly innovative director, staging the works of Brecht, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Strindberg, Chekhov and others at a variety of important venues such as the New York Shakepespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theatre, Lincoln Center, and the Yale Repertory Theatre, where Serban was director from 1977-78. He is known for his opposition to the traditional "method" style of training American actors typically receive, for the strong classical Greek influences in his work, for exploring the rich interplay between sound and image, and for his tutelage by famed British director Peter Brook, who asked Serban to work with him in Europe in the 1970s. Professor Booth is one of the best known Shakespeare scholars in America. His 1969 An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets remains a seminal exploration of the Bard’s short poems, while his is perhaps the definitive edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1977). Booth’s 1983 King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy explores the ways in which tragedy often overwhelms our schema of critical comprehension and confounds our analytical expectations. His most recent book, Precious Nonsense: the Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson’s Epitaphs, and Twelfth Night (1989) takes a look at the writings of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Abraham Lincoln, and explores how works of literature may be at once profound and yet intentionally frivolous. In addition to her scholarship, Professor Levin has worked for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and The City of New York in various cultural functions. At City College, she has produced Shakespeare-era plays that have rarely received contemporary stagings, such as a recent production of John Lyly’s Gallathea. The conference, an annual event, is sponsored by The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in English, the Sidney E. Cohn and Lucille Lortel Chairs in Theatre Studies, and the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program, with assistance from the CUNY Faculty Development Program and the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts at The City College of New York. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, it draws its faculty of more than 1,600 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, the CUNY Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 24 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center’s rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: |