Open Books Event -- Sean Carney

FREE PUBLIC SERIES –  OPEN
BOOKS: Sean Carney

What exactly
is a tragedy? Can any contemporary play be considered a true tragedy? Or is our
era just too spiritually puny, too mired in the trivial, the mundane, and the
petty political to aspire to that grandiose dramatic form? In his dazzling and
audacious book, Sean Carney explores this longstanding question by examining
the work of recent British dramatists such as Edward Bond, David Hare, Howard
Barker, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane. The Politics and
Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy cuts to the heart of our anxieties
about our capacity for tragic experience and points to answers hiding in plain
sight.

OPEN BOOKS: Sean Carney is the
second offering in our 2014 Open Books Series, a program of free public talks
curated by the Theatre’s Literary Advisor Jonathan
Kalb.

ABOUT THE SERIES: As a modern
classical theater dedicated to the language and ideas of writers, Theater for a
New Audience sees great thinking and writing about our theatrical heritage as
essential to its mission. The free Open Books lecture series provides a forum
for the authors of some of the best new books on theater to share their wisdom,
perceptions and discoveries directly with our audiences. The lecture subjects
range over the vast expanse of the theatrical past, drawing connections with
the complex present as part of the theater’s ongoing reassessment of the
classical.

Sean Carney is an
associate professor of Drama and Theatre in the Department of English, McGill
University, Montreal.  His publications
include Brecht and Critical Theory:
Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics, and essays on English drama in a
variety of academic journals.  Recent
directing work at McGill includes Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream, and The
Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

FREE EVENT.  To RSVP or
for further information, contact humanities@tfana.org or visit www.tfana.org.