Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Kitchen Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Season continues with an exciting international collaboration. Actors, playwrights and artists from the U.S. and Turkey have come together to create the play S/HE, which will have its world premiere production at the Kitchen Theatre in May 2011. S/HE has previews on May 4, 5, and 6, Opening Night is May 7, and performances continue through May 15, 2011. In the fall of 2011, the production will travel to Turkey and New York City.

The Kitchen Theatre’s partners in this project are Cornell University, Yeditepe University in Istanbul, and International Culture Lab (ICL), a theatre company co-founded by Melanie Dreyer, Assistant Professor of Directing and Acting in Cornell University’s Department of Theatre, Film and Dance, and Gabriele Schafer, a professional actress and translator based in New York City. Dreyer also serves as the director of the play.

At the core of the piece are one-act plays written by American playwright Tammy Ryan and Turkish playwright Zeynep Kaçar. They consider what it means to be a woman, exploring the body as a battleground from two cultural perspectives. The plays were interwoven in a workshop process involving the entire creative team, including an acting ensemble of two professional Turkish actors, two ICL company actors, and one student each from ICL’s university partners, Cornell University and Yeditepe University (Istanbul).

Kaçar’s play takes a satiric look at Turkish societal standards of beauty, desirability, and gender politics. In Ryan’s play, a high school girl is date-raped by her boyfriend, and the resulting pregnancy forces her to examine definitions of love and self and who controls what happens to her body. The piece is performed in both English and Turkish.

• A workshop for students on contemporary Turkish theatre will be given by Meting Balay, head of the acting program at Istanbul’s Yeditepe University;
• The Cornell Law School will create a trial on the right to veil on campus, providing opportunities for undergraduate theatre students to work with graduate law students to examine this issue from a judicial perspective;
• Cornell’s German Culture Studies program will host a lecture by renowned scholar Nilüfer Göle, a leading authority on contemporary Islam;
• A panel of local experts from Planned Parenthood, the Turkish Cultural Center, a doctor specializing in sexual dysfunction, the owner of a local tattoo parlor, and an expert on Domestic Violence will speak to and with the audience about their individual areas of expertise, offering new perspectives on the content and themes of the plays, as well as a forum for debate about the issues; and
• Cornell’s Department of Theatre, Film and Dance and the Kitchen Theatre Company will present an exhibit of historical Turkish dress in their respective lobbies during the run of the show.

Please check the Kitchen Theatre web site for dates and times for these events.

The design team for S/HE comes from Ithaca, New York City, and Pittsburgh. The Set Designer is Stephanie Mayer-Staley, Head of Design at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA. Lighting Design is by E.D. Intemann, Senior Lecturer and the Resident Lighting Designer at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at Cornell University. Costume Designer is Pei-Chi Su, Assistant Professor of Costume Design at Hofstra University. The Sound Design is by Pittsburgh-area designer Nicholas Crano. The Stage Manager is LaShawn Keyser. Performances will be at the Kitchen Theatre, located at 417 W. State / Martin Luther King, Jr. Street in downtown Ithaca, NY.

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