In 2012, Stanford Summer Theater celebrates its 14th season with the Sam Shepard Festival, exploring the work of this great American playwright, actor, and screenwriter. The Festival features a major production of Curse of the Starving Class, July 19-August 12, 2012, in Pigott Theater on the Stanford campus. Directed by Rush Rehm, Curse of the Starving Class stars SST veterans Marty Pistone (Restoration Comedy) as Weston, Courtney Walsh (Old Times, Oedipus, Electra, Faith Healer) as Ella. The cast includes Max-Sosna Spear (Wesley), Jessica Waldman (Emma), Ben Fisher (Taylor), Keith Marshall (Ellis), Michael Vang (Malcom), Ben Knoll (Slater), and Philip Greenspoon (Emerson).
The Sam Shepard Festival includes a free film series focusing on Shepard’s cinematic work (as an Oscar-nominated actor and prize-winning screenwriter), a community symposium exploring “Sam Shepard and the Eclectic American West,” and a Continuing Studies course “Shepard and American Realism.”
Stanford Summer Theater (SST) recently concluded its 2011 Memory Play Festival, a yearlong collaborative exploration of theater and memory. We presented George Packer’s Betrayed in Annenberg Auditorium in May, Harold Pinter's Old Times in Pigott Theater in July, and Seneca's Oedipus (Ted Hughes’ translation) at the Nitery Theater in August 2011. Our free summer film series on cinematic memory offered screenings of Out of the Past, Spellbound, La Guerre est finie, Memento, and Music Box, with post-show discussions led by Stanford faculty. In conjunction with Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program, the festival also included an all-day symposium Stages of Memory and a Continuing Studies course, “Theater and Memory.”
The Memory Play Festival continued in the fall with the inaugural Poetics of Aging Conference held in San Francisco November 16-19, 2011. SST artists presented scenes dealing with age, memory, and mortality, drawn from the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Beckett, and Didion. We concluded the Memory Play Festival with a production of Michael Frayn’s prize-winning Copenhagen in December 2011, starring Julian Lopez-Morillas as Niels Bohr, Peter Ruocco as Werner Heisenberg, and Courtney Walsh as Margrethe Bohr. Frayn’s Copenhagen offered a fitting close to SST’s Memory Play Festival, dramatizing both the uncertainty and necessity of memory, essential imperatives in our nuclear world where the consequences could lead to final darkness.
Reviews of Memory Play Festival
11.28.2011 - "Copenhagen" - Stanford Report
"Classical Theater Offers Perspectives on Aging" - The Humanities at Stanford
7.30.2011 - "Stanford Summer Theater's Oedipus" - Examiner
7.29.2011 - "Seneca's 'Oedipus' at Stanford Summer Theater" - Palo Alto Daily News
7.28.2011 - "Bay Area weekend arts picks" - San Francisco Chronicle
7.9.2011 - "Back story: Rush Rehm, director of Stanford Summer Theater" - San Jose Mercury News
7.8.2011 - "Memories that may not have happened" - Palo Alto Daily News
7.7.2011 - "Old Times by Harold Pinter" - Examiner
7.3.2011 - "This Week: Old Times" - San Francisco Chronicle (pdf)
6.23.2011 - "Truth takes a nasty turn: At Stanford, two plays explore memory and deception" - Stanford Report
5.17.11 -"George Packer brings 'Betrayed' to Stanford" - Stanford Report
"Scholars and Students Collaborate to Create a New Version of a Timeless Tale" - The Humanities at Stanford
Sponsors of SST’s Memory Play Festival included Stanford Continuing Studies Program, Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa), Stanford Departments of Drama and Classics, the Mcoy Family Center for Ethics and Society, the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Vice-Provost of Graduate Education, the School of Humanities and Sciences, and AgeSong Institute.
