Past Events
GRG Seminar: 'Mothers, Daughters, and Loss as National History', Dr Sara Freeman
- Venue: Room G9, Percy Building, Newcastle University
- Start: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 16:30:00 BST
- End: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 18:00:00 BST
'Mothers, Daughters, and Loss as National History: Kushner and Wertenbaker's Mothers and the Decolonizing Nation, with a Hot Take on the Globe's Boudica'
Dr Sara Freeman, University of Puget Sound
Abstract:
As politically minded authors, playwrights Tony Kushner and Timberlake Wertenbaker regularly employ epic dramatic structures that link family stories to the larger forces of social movements and international relations, including the heritage of colonialism. Written close in time to each other, their plays Homebody/Kabul and Credible Witness capture the shifting Anglo-American interaction with the wider world in a way that speaks to the revivified sense of dislocation produced by an increased awareness of global terrorism in the twenty-first century and the ever more present need to reconfigure international relations. In these plays, the absence and presence of mother figures interact with notions of emplacement or displacement, home and exile, figuring how the geopolitical and the maternal intersect in the wake of personal and global loss.
Bio:
Dr Sara Freeman is an associate professor of theatre at the University of Puget Sound in the United States and her research focuses on alternative British theatre companies, contemporary plays and playwrights, and experimental, feminist, and political theatre. She recently published chapters on Timberlake Wertenbaker, the Gay Sweatshop theatre company, and British anti-nuclear plays. She coedited the volumes: International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformation in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker and Public Theatres and Theatre Publics. She is the editor of the journal Theatre History Studies.