Naomi Wallace

 Transgression, Politics and the Engaged Play:
a playwriting intensive
July 31 - August 3, 2008
$500
$425 (15% discount) if registered and paid in full by June 13th

Don’t miss the rare opportunity to study with this recent winner of the MacArthur "Genius" Award for playwriting.

The workshop is completely full!  Please check back for future opportunities.

Class Information:

Transgression, Politics and the Engaged Play

Class Dates:*
Thurs, 7/31  6:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Fri, 8/1  6:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Sat, 8/2  10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Sun, 8/3  10:00 am - 2:00 pm
*16 Total Class Hours

Class Price:
$500
$425 (15% Discount) if registered and paid in full by June 13th
NOTE: partial scholarships available for those in need, and discounts available for those who have taken an institute class in the past twelve months

Class Description:
Writing for the theatre is at its best and act of transgression...we should encourage our students to step over the line, redraw the line, erase the line, even multiply the lines so that we sit up, step forward, strike out.  I believe the job of mainstream culture and mainstream theatre is to keep the peace.  Our job...is to encourage new writers to break it, to disrupt the lie, to speak truth to power.  Think seriously about the word en-courage:  What are we giving our students courage to do, exactly?"
-Naomi Wallace, American Theatre
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In this four-day intensive writing workshop/experience with the incomparable Ms. Wallace, students will gain techniques and opportunities to transgress the own deeply help assumptions about themselves and their relationship to mainstream culture and society.  How does an artist achieve what bell hooks calls "self-transgression" and a "critical awareness of self" that will allow her/him to dissect the social issues s/he is most passionate about?  How can a playwright develop a new "way of seeing" for her/himself--a term coined by John Berger that refers to the socially and culturally determined choices an individual makes when writing.  The class is designed to move writers to find new ways to think outside their own experience, their own gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation and culture.  Ms. Wallace will engage the class in her six-point process to nudge participants to transgress and disrupt normative ways of seeing and create a more compelling and engaged drama for the stage. 

"If writers can re-imagine language, with an effort that aspires to fluency in history and its myriad forces, then we can re-imagine ourselves and our communities--and that, for me as a writer, is the highest aspiration...I am not calling for a condescending theatre...but a welcoming, vigorous, inquisitive and brutal theatre...to get out of what I call the "wow" state of mind to a "how" state of mind."
--Naomi Wallace

About the Instructor:

Naomi Wallace's work has been produced in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.  Her work has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writer's Drama Award, and an Obie.  She is also a recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.  Her plays include One Flea Spare, In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, The Inland Sea, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours and (forthcoming) The Hard Weather Boating Party.  Her award winning film Lawn Dogs is available on DVD.  Her new film The War Boys, co-produced by Bruce McLeod, will be released next year.