Creative writing faculty will participate in a free discussion following the 2 p.m. Oct. 25 performance of PlayMakers Repertory Company’s current production, “Seminar.”
The event is sponsored by PlayMakers and the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English & Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both the play and discussion will be held in the Paul Green Theatre at the Center for Dramatic Art on Country Club Road. The post-show event is free and open to the public. For information and to purchase tickets to the play, call (919) 962-7529 or visit www.playmakersrep.org.
The post-show conversation will feature Daniel Wallace, J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English, and Randall Kenan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and will be moderated by Gregory Kable, PlayMakers’ dramaturg and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Dramatic Art.
Daniel Wallace is author of four novels, including “Big Fish” (1998), “Ray in Reverse” (2000), “The Watermelon King” (2003) and “Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician” (2007). He has written one book for children, “Elynora.” His illustrations have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Italian Vanity Fair, and many other magazines and books, including Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensible Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers, by George Singleton, and Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink, by Marianne Gingher. “Big Fish” was made into a motion picture of the same name by Tim Burton in 2003.
Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, “A Visitation of Spirits;” two works of non-fiction, “Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Fire This Time;” and a collection of stories, “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead.” He edited and wrote the introduction for “The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin.” Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize.
In the dramatic-comedy “Seminar,” four aspiring young writers ante up big bucks to learn from a legendary novelist, but their fiction and their egos will be unsparingly dissected before he’s through. PlayMakers’ Ray Dooley (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) leads the acting company in a no-holds-barred master class on power, sex and the nature of art. Ferocious and fast-paced with sparkling wordplay, “Seminar” takes no prisoners.
