“The play was Juno, the writer Sean O’Casey – but the melody was one that I had known for a very long while. I was seventeen and I did not think then of writing the melody as I knew it – in a different key; but I believe it entered my consciousness and stayed there.”
– Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Lorraine Hansberry and Sean O’Casey are each pivotal, pioneering figures in African American and Irish theatre, respectively, and their works have had immense cultural impact and influence beyond the stage. The story Hansberry tells of her encounter with O’Casey’s work as a teenager, and its impact on her own creative life, speaks to the powerful cross-cultural resonances and rich emotion that both playwrights have made viscerally available to audiences over the last century, and the complex humanity that each contributed to the artform by putting their own cultural experiences center stage at times when those experiences were vastly underrepresented and undervalued in popular culture.
In celebration of NYU Skirball’s presentation of Druid Theatre Company’s DruidO’Casey – join Professors Kristen Wright (NYU Tisch), John Waters (Glucksman Ireland House), and Michael Dinwiddie (NYU Gallatin) to discuss Hansberry’s famous, influential encounter with O’Casey’s work, and to consider the resonances between these important playwrights, the power of representation and live performance, and legacies of cultural exchange between African American and Irish artists.
Join us after the talk for a reception. Free and open to the public – RSVP below.
Co-presented by NYU Skirball & Glucksman Ireland House, NYU. Please note: This event is at Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews, New York, NY – not at NYU Skirball!
Kristen Wright is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her work exists at the intersections of African-American drama (from the 19th century to the present), Black performance studies, and critical theory. She has published articles and reviews in Theatre Topics, Black Perspectives, the Gale Researcher’s American Literature volume, Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, and Texas Theatre Journal. Dr. Wright also has a piece forthcoming in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Dr. Wright has been a Member-at-Large for the Performance Studies Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) since 2017, and also served on the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Graduate Student Caucus as the Representative to the Committee on New Paradigms in Graduate Education. Dr. Wright was previously the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow in the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College, and prior to that appointment, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Scholars Program at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities.
John Waters is Clinical Associate Professor of Irish Studies and of English at New York University. Trained as a scholar of British Romantic and Modernist Literature, Professor Waters has since arriving at NYU taught a broad range of survey and specialist courses for the English Department and the Irish Studies Program. He served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Irish Studies Program from 2000-2016. The founding Director of the Inter-disciplinary MA Program in Irish and Irish-American Studies at NYU in 2007, he served in that role until 2016. He has published a survey of Post-war poetry from Northern Ireland for Blackwell’s, and more recently a brief history of Irish Studies in North America for the Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies. In addition to teaching courses in all periods of Irish writing, he regularly teaches courses at both graduate and undergraduate level on race and identity in Ireland and Irish-America, on writing and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, on James Joyce, on Samuel Beckett, on Irish Crime Fiction, on Philosophical Comedy, and on Music and Lyric Poetry. His current research centers on writing about Exile and Migration, with a particular focus on how contemporary writers explore the refugee experience of the global climate crisis.
Michael D. Dinwiddie’s teaching interests include cultural studies, African American theater history, dramatic writing, filmmaking and ragtime music. A dramatist whose works have been produced in New York, regional, and educational theater, he has been playwright-in-residence at Michigan State University and St. Louis University and taught writing courses at the College of New Rochelle, Florida A&M University, SUNY Stony Brook, California State University at San Bernardino, and Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He spent a year at Touchstone Pictures as a Walt Disney Fellow and worked as a staff writer on ABC-TV’s Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. He was awarded a 1995 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting. Professor Dinwiddie received a 2005 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award in recognition that one of NYU’s primary institutional priorities, along with research, is exceptional teaching inside and outside of the classroom setting. In 2015, he was awarded a team-teaching grant from NYU Humanities Initiative for the course “Movements for Justice and Rights: Let Them Lead the Way.” His course offerings include Migration and American Culture; Dramatizing History I and II; Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip-Hop; James Reese Europe and American Music; Sissle, Blake and the Minstrel Tradition; Guerrilla Screenwriting; Motown Matrix: Race, Gender and Class Identity in “The Sound of Young America;” and the study-abroad course Buenos Aires: In and of the City.