Timberlake Wertenbaker
Royden B. Davis, S.J. Visiting Professor for the 2005-06 Year
College Dean Jane McAuliffe and Professor Maya Roth have announced that acclaimed British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has accepted the invitation of the College's Theater Program to become the Royden B. Davis S.J. Visiting Professor for the 2005-06 academic year. Internationally-recognized for works such as Our Country's Good, The Love of the Nightingale, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Credible Witness, and After Darwin, Wertenbaker writes of history, immigrations, gender, and justice. She has won the London Critic's Circle Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play, and the Writers Guild Award, among others.
She has adapted and translated works by Marivaux, Anouilh, Maeterlinck, Pirandello, Sophocles and Euripides and has also written the screenplays for film adaptations of Edith Wharton's The Children and Henry James' The Wings of the Dove. Her most recent stage adaptation is Galileo's Daughter, premiered by Peter Hall this year at the Theatre Royal.
The playwright's focus resonates deeply with Georgetown University's emphasis on social justice and theater of conscience. Her concern with history, classics, international human rights, and feminism also play to the interdisciplinary spirit of our college community, and the ways that performance helps to teach the humanities as well as creative rigor.
Professor Roth, Director of the Theater Program describes Wertenbaker as "a (post) modern classicist, who brings a reverent irreverence for the classics. Her writing for radio, stage and film is erudite, imminently theatrical, deeply international, socially engaged. She writes plays that are funny and moving, historical and imaginative. Like her contemporaries Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard, Wertenbaker engages ideas while creating great art. Moreover, she is an impressive match with the diverse interests of Georgetown's community, both within Theater and the university as a whole. It is an extraordinary honor for Georgetown College, and the Theater Program, to host an artist of this international standing. From conversations with her, I can say that she is as equally excited by the residency!"
Wertenbaker will be in residence at Georgetown for the opening and first year of the Royden B. Davis, S.J., Performing Arts Center. In the fall she will teach a seminar entitled War and Peace: History in Drama; in the spring semester she will lead masterclasses and present a public lecture, as well as completing work on a new play.
For further information, please call (202) 687-6933.
