TFANA Talks

Deepen your experience of TIMON OF ATHENS with free post-show conversations with artists and scholars following matinee performances. TFANA Talks are free and open to the public and do not require a ticket to that day’s performance.
 
Saturday, January 18 at 5:00pm at The Center for Fiction (15 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217)
Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Gregory Doran, director Simon Godwin, TFANA Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz, and Olivier Award-winning actor Kathryn Hunter in a conversation moderated by Brooklyn College English professor Tanya Pollard.
 
About the Panelists
GREGORY DORAN is the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Described by the Sunday Times as “one of the great Shakespearians of his generation” Greg has directed over three quarters of the Shakespeare canon, including Macbeth with Antony Sher, Hamlet with David Tennant, Antony and Cleopatra with Harriet Walter and Patrick Stewart, All’s Well that Ends Well with Judi Dench, The Tempest with Simon Russell Beale, and Julius Caesar with an all black British cast. He initiated “Live From Stratford-upon-Avon”, broadcasting Shakespeare’s plays around the world.
 
SIMON GODWIN (Director) is director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company and an associate director at the National Theatre, where he has directed Hansard, Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night, The Beaux’ Stratagem, Man and Superman and Strange Interlude. Simon is the former associate director of the Royal Court and Bristol Old Vic, where he directed numerous world premieres and classics. For the RSC, his productions include Hamlet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Other work includes Richard II for Shakespeare’s Globe and a Japanese production of Hamlet in Tokyo for Theatre Cocoon.
 
JEFFREY HOROWITZ is the Founding Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience. He began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the advisory board of the Shakespeare Society and artistic directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. Awards: 2003 John Houseman Award, The Acting Company; 2004 Gaudium Award, Breukelein Institute; 2014 Alfred Drake Award, Brooklyn College; 2019 Obie Lifetime Achievement Award.
 
KATHRYN HUNTER (Timon).  TFANA: Why?, The Valley of Astonishment, Fragments (CICT/Bouffes du Nord), Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer  Night’s Dream, Kafka’s Monkey, The Emperor (Young Vic). Other theatre credits: Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear (RSC); Prometheus Bound (Epidaurus); Richard III (Globe); and The Visit (National Theatre, Olivier Award for Best Actress). Film credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing, Tale of Tales, Black Earth Rising, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
 
TANYA POLLARD is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017), Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005), and Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (2003). She has co-edited Reader in Tragedy (2019) with Marcus Nevitt; Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theaters (2017) and Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts (2016) with Tania Demetriou; and Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (2013) with Katharine Craik. A former Rhodes Scholar, she has received fellowships from the NEH, Whiting, and Mellon foundations and the Warburg Institute.
 
Sunday, January 26 at 4:45pm
Ayanna Thompson, chair of TFANA’s Council of Scholars and director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at Arizona State University, in conversation with theater director, writer, and composer P.A. Skantze.
 
About the Panelists
AYANNA THOMPSON is director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at Arizona State University. She is the author of Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently working on a collection of essays for Cambridge University Press on Shakespeare and race, and is collaborating with Curtis Perry for a new edition of Titus Andronicus. Professor Thompson was the 2018-19 president of the Shakespeare Association of America, and has served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars. She was one of Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholars for 2017-2018.
 
P.A. SKANTZE is a theatre director, writer and composer working in Italy and London.  Reader in Performance Practices at Roehampton University, Skantze is the author of Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (Routledge 2003) and Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (Punctum 2013) as well as articles on creative practice, articles practicing creatively, and articles on sound, black critical studies, the Undercommons and gender. She is working on a New York production of her musical STACKS, an opera libretto based on Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, and following her staged textual interventions for the opera Falstaff at the National Theatre of Croatia in 2018 she is creating a performance that moves between spoken play and sung opera, Scoring Macbeth, at the National Theatre of Croatia in 2020. 

 

Saturday, February 1 at 4:45pm
Bianca Vivion Brooks (New York Times columnist) in conversation with cast members Shirine Babb and Elia Monte-Brown, moderated by TFANA Artistic Associate Peter Cook.