Calendar

April 13 at 8pm, April 14 at 2pm

Back Office Studio

$7 General Admission

PURCHASE TICKETS

For this Neighborhood Theatre Group fundraiser, we will transform the Back Office Studio into a coffeehouse. Join us for an evening of poetry and music from some of Ypsilanti’s most talented performers.

Directed and conceived by Dianne Bernick

Starring R. Darrow Bernick, Eric Hohnke, Maegan Murphy, Emily Rogers-Driskell, and Craig VanKempen

Featuring Tom Hett on piano and bass and Rudy Bernick on accordion

A special Saturday night pre-show with Paul Keller on bass and Rudy Bernick on accordion

Student directors from RC Drama Major course RC Hums 482 present their own final projects with the students of RC Hums 281.

RC Singers presents, “Let the River Run,” conducted by Joseph Kemper. The concert will include ensemble singing, soloists, speakers, instrumentalists, and visual projections. This will be a benefit concert for “We the People of Detroit”, a local non-profit supporting water rights.

Please join us as we celebrate the winners of the 2018-19 Hopwood Awards.
Following the announcement of the awards, there will be a lecture from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als and a light reception. Free to attend and open to all!

Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for ‘The Talk of the Town,’ he became a staff writer in 1994, theatre critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. Week after week, he brings to the magazine a rigorous, sharp, and lyrical perspective on acting, playwriting, and directing. With his deep knowledge of the history of performance—not only in theatre but in dance, music, and visual art—he shows us how to view a production and how to place its director, its author, and its performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theatre, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America.

Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He is author of the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Early Stories of Truman Capote. He is also guest editor for the 2018 Best American Essays (Mariner Books, October 2, 2018). He also wrote Andy Warhol: The Series, a book containing two previously unpublished television scripts for a series on the life of Andy Warhol.

In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2016, he received Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature, in 2017 Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal.

In 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Bond on “Cold Water,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In 2010, he co-curated “Self-Consciousness,” at the VeneKlasen/Werner gallery, in Berlin, and published “Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis.” In 2015, he collaborated with the artist Celia Paul to create “Desdemona for Celia by Hilton,” an exhibition for the Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met. In 2016, his debut art show “One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie and the Rest” opened at the Artist’s Institute. In 2017 he curated “Alice Neel, Uptown” at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.

Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

Literati is excited to welcome poet Sue William Silverman in celebration of her new poetry collection If the Girl Never Learns: Poems. Sue will be joined by fellow poets Keith Taylor, Elizabeth Schumhl, and Marc Sheehan who will be reading from their own work.

About If the Girl Never Learns:
From the opening lines, it’s clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged–which is another way to say she’s a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society’s suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems’ sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl’s absolute need to control her own destiny, to outrun her past, while at the same time chasing a future she alone has envisioned and embodied. Because The Girl is, above all else, a badass.

Sue William Silverman’s first poetry collection is Hieroglyphics in Neon. She is also the author of four books of creative nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, was a finalist in Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award. Her memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the AWP Award, and Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction is also a Lifetime TV original movie. Her craft book is Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, and she teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

The poet Marc Sheehan is a life-long Michigan resident. He has earned degrees from Western Michigan University, Central Michigan University and the University of Michigan, where he received a Major Hopwood Award in Poetry. His honors also include grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as Writer Center Coordinator at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, and has reviewed books for both the Lansing Capital Times and On the Town.

Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Keith Taylor has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.

Chamber Music, directed by Katri Ervamaa. Featuring music by Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, and others. April 20, 2pm and April 22, 6pm, Keene Theater. Free.

Chamber Music, directed by Katri Ervamaa. Featuring music by Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, and others. April 20, 2pm and April 22, 6pm, Keene Theater. Free.

Renaissance Drama presents, Commedia del’arte final performance directed by Martin Walsh. Featuring a period scenario about “Il cavadente” or “the tooth puller”, a bogus dentist that pulls the teeth out of the evil Pantelone. April 23, 1-2pm, North Courtyard if weather permits.