Events: A Collaboration with Penumbra

As part of our ongoing collaboration with Twin Cities community organizations, English and St. Paul's pioneering Penumbra Theatre are co-presenting Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage February 18, 2015, at Coffman Union Theater. Nottage's By the Way, Meet Vera Stark runs February 5-March 1 at Penumbra.


A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow and decorated playwright, Lynn Nottage (right) has been on the radar of the English department committee that selects award-winning writers for the Esther Freier Endowed Lectures in Literature each year. When Penumbra Theatre announced its 2014-15 season--with a February production of Nottage's most recent play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark--committee members seized the opportunity and reached out to Penumbra Co-Artistic Director Sarah Bellamy.

Community-campus alliance
Bellamy was excited to hear from us, and a unique collaboration was forged. Nottage will give the 29th Esther Freier Lecture 7:30 pm Wednesday, February 18, at Coffman Union Theater, presenting--with Penumbra actors--an excerpt from her forthcoming play about Reading, Pennsylvania. Nottage will provide context for the work and, with assistance from Sarah Bellamy, field audience questions. Professor of English Josephine Lee, a scholar of modern American drama, introduces Nottage. As always, Freier events are free and open to the public; no tickets necessary.

"We are honored to collaborate with Penumbra Theatre, one of the most distinguished theaters in the United States," affirms Freier Committee Chair and Professor Shirley Garner. "And glad to foster an alliance between academic and artistic communities--the sort envisioned by CLA Dean John Coleman in his recent address on the future of CLA."

Nottage's contribution to humanistic inquiry
Long-time University clinical chemistry professor Esther Freier established the Freier Lectures in Literature to bring to the University and Twin Cities prize-winning national and international authors "whose work had made a significant contribution to humanistic inquiry through literature and literary study."

Nottage more than fits the bill. According to The Los Angeles Times, "Nottage magnificently exposes the contradictions and confusions that make simplistic labels unthinkable." Nottage won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize and an OBIE for her play Ruined, about women taking shelter from civil war in a Congo brothel. She had already won an OBIE for Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine (2004), a sequel to her widely produced 2003 play Intimate Apparel, which in its New York run starred Viola Davis as a lonely 1905 seamstress.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark follows a talented black actress who struggles with the stereotypical roles Hollywood offered minorities through its Golden Age. Purchase tickets to the Penumbra production of Vera Stark here.