 CAROLINA TO HOST RICHARD WRIGHT CENTENNIAL
Chapel Hill, N.C. -- During the weekend of April 11th-13th, 2008, The University of North Carolina will commemorate the life and work of novelist, essayist and poet Richard Wright, to mark the centennial of his birth in 1908.
Over the course of the weekend-long centenary, Wright’s life and work will be celebrated in a staged-reading of Paul Green’s revised adaptation of Native Son, a colloquium hosted by UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities, and will conclude with a commemorative performance event at UNC’s Memorial Hall.
The Centennial Celebration: When and Where
1. Staged Reading of the Paul Green Adaptation of Native Son
Saturday, April 12th at 7:30 pm at UNC’s Gerrard Hall
Free Admission at the door of Gerrard Hall. Call Memorial Hall Box Office at 843-3333 for more information.
2. The Richard Wright Centennial Colloquium
Sunday, April 13th at 1 pm at the University Room of the Institute for Arts and Humanities at Hyde Hall
Free Admission, all ticket inquiries through Carry Matthews at the Institute for Arts and Humanities at crmatthe@email.unc.edu
3. Richard Wright Centennial Commemorative
Sunday, April 13th at 7:30 pm at UNC’s Memorial Hall
Free Admission, reserve tickets through the Memorial Hall Box Office at 843-3333.
Tickets available beginning on March 31st
The Richard Wright Centennial Commemorative at Memorial Hall
The culmination of proceedings will be a special Richard Wright Centennial Commemorative, open to the public and free of charge on Sunday, April 13t at 7:30 pm at UNC’s Memorial Hall. The University is honored to have Julia Wright, daughter of Richard Wright participate in a program that will feature a dramatic narrative of Wright's life and performed readings of his work. The original production will be based on biographical and autobiographical sources and will include performed selections from Wright’s fiction and non-fiction (e.g. Native Son, “The Problem of the Hero,” “The Outsider,” "Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite," and "Blueprint for Negro Writing"). Wright's letters, poetry, and music, along with film clips and documentary footage, will be interwoven throughout the evening's performance. Julia Wright will present a selection from her father’s last, unfinished work, A Father’s Law. The evening, co-written with Dr. Adam Versenyi and directed by Joseph Megel, will also feature scenes from Paul Green's adaptation of Native Son, a collaboration between Green and Wright undertaken in Chapel Hill in the summer of 1940; the story of this Green-Wright collaboration will be a prominent feature of the performance and a point of particular interest.
The program will feature Broadway performer Keith Randolph Smith, playwright and actor Keith Glover, Brandon Dirden, recently featured in the Playmakers Repertory Co. production of Topdog/Underdog, John Feltch, Elizabeth Lewis Corley, and members of the New Traditions Theatre Company, with aforementioned special guest Julia Wright. The program will also feature the talents of guest North Carolina blues musicians Lightnin’ Wells and John Dee Holeman.
The Richard Wright Centennial Colloquium
Wright’s contributions to literary, social, and political dialogue will be examined at the Richard Wright Centennial Colloquium at 1 o’clock in the afternoon of April 13th, hosted by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Hyde Hall on the UNC-CH campus Featured at the colloquium will be Julia Wright, who will deliver her paper entitled “Richard Wright’s Premonition of Katrina in his Flood Stories,” Dr. Jerry Ward, who will deliver his paper "One Writer's Legacy: Richard Wright and Our 21st Century," and Dr. Margaret Bauer, delivering her paper entitled “Call me Paul: The Long, Hot Summer of Paul Green and Richard Wright” by Dr. Margaret D. Bauer.
Respondents will include author Dr. Trudier Harris, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Drs. Randall Kenan and Mae Henderson, Professors of English and Comparative Literature, and will be moderated by Dr. Laurence Avery, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, all of UNC-CH.
Stage Reading of the Paul Green adaptation of Native Son at Gerrard Hall
On Saturday, April 12th, 7:30 pm at Gerrard Hall, the Centennial celebration will present a staged reading, also free of charge, of Carolina alumnus and noted playwright Paul Green’s adaptation of Native Son, the revision of the original collaboration between Green and Wright undertaken in Chapel Hill during the summer of 1940. The reading will prominently feature the New Traditions Theater Company.
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The Richard Wright Centennial is sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South, Carolina Performing Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, The Paul Green Foundation, Departments of Dramatic Art and Communication Studies with the generous support of the Music Maker Foundation and the New Traditions Theatre Company. A unique collaboration between the University, the Chapel Hill community, and regional academia, the Richard Wright Centennial Celebration seeks to raise awareness of Wright’s impact on national identity.
Ticket information for the staged reading of Native Son and the Richard Wright Centennial Commemorative can be obtained via the Memorial Hall Box Office at 843-3333. Tickets for the Richard Wright Centennial Colloquium can be obtained via Carry Matthews at the Institute for Arts and Humanities at crmatthe@email.unc.edu. For all other queries, contact coordinator Jonah Garson at jonahgarson@gmail.com.
ABOUT OUR SPECIAL GUESTS
Julia Wright is her father’s eldest daughter and a writer in her own right, having composed memoirs of life with her father as well as having been an outspoken critic of the death penalty.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Distinguished Eminent Scholar and Professor of English and African World Studies at Dillard University, is a Richard Wright scholar and one of the founders of the Richard Wright Circle. Prior to assuming his current position, Ward was the Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College. His poems and essays have been published in professional and literary journals and in anthologies. Ward is co-editor with Robert Butler of the Richard Wright Encyclopedia (forthcoming from Greenwood Press) and author of THE KATRINA PAPERS: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery. His work-in-progress includes Reading Race Reading America: Social and Literary Essays, Hollis Watkins: An Oral Autobiography, and Richard Wright: A Reader's Responses.
Margaret D. Bauer is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature and Professor of English at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. She is the author of The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (1999) and William Faulkner’s Legacy (2005), and she edited the forthcoming book, “Watering the Sahara”: Young Paul Green, the Years 1894-1937 by James R. Spence. Her current book projects include a volume on Louisiana’s Tim Gautreaux for the University of South Carolina Press’s Understanding Contemporary American Authors Series and a study of friendships between women in Southern literature. Bauer is the 2004 Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences recipient of the East Carolina University Scholar-Teacher Award and was named one of the ten 2006 ECU Women of Distinction. In 2007, she received the Parnassus Award for Significant Literary Achievement from the Council of Editors of Literary Journals for her work as editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, which she has edited since 1997. She is also serving as President of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Her paper on Paul Green and Richard Wright will be based on her article forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly’s 2008 special issue on Wright.
Dr. Laurence Avery is a professor of English and comparative literature at UNC and will moderate the April 13 symposium. His published works include Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981, and the edition of The Lost Colony). He served as the Secretary of Faculty (1989-1991), the Chair of the Department of English from (1991-1996), and president of the Pail Green Foundation (1989-2007).
Dr. Trudier Harris is the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Among her more
than twenty authored and edited volumes are Fiction and Folklore: The
Novels of Toni Morrison (1991) and a memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections
from a Black Daughter of the South (2003).
Mae Gwendolyn Henderson is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, cultural studies and cultural criticism, and black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817-1871 (1980). Henderson is also author of "Black Expatriate Writers in France" as well as essays on black expatriate dancer and performing artist, Josephine Baker, and expatriate writers, James Baldwin and Richard Wright.
Randall Kenan is the author of several books, including A Visitation of Spirits, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is The Fire This Time. He is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
New Traditions Theatre is a collective of predominately African-American artists committed to developing and performing theatrical works. Found members are Thaddaeus Edwards, Leigh Holmes, Barbette Hunter, Byron Jennings, Chaunesti Webb Lyon, Jackie Marriott, Geraud Staton, TeKay and LeMark Wright.
FEATURED MUSICIANS
John Dee Holeman was born in Orange County, North Carolina in 1929. He is a storyteller, dancer and a blues artist who played with musicians who had learned directly from Blind Boy Fuller. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage fellowship and a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award.
Mike "Lightnin'" Wells was raised in North Carolina and has had an interest in traditional forms of music since childhood. An avid collector of country and blues recordings, these formed the basis for his developing style of playing and singing using a variety of acoustic instruments, including the guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, and harmonica.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Joseph Megel is an artist in residence at UNC – Chapel Hill, a member of SSDC (Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers), Co-Artistic Director of StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, and an Associate Artist for The Working Theatre in New York. He has been a visiting artist at Emory University, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Arizona State University (Distinguished Artist at the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing), and University of Virginia. He directed Guillermo Reyes’s Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown in its Off-Broadway production (Outer Critics Circle Award). He also directed Jennifer Maisel’s The Last Seder (winner of the Kennedy Center National New Play Award) in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and in readings in NYC, LA and elsewhere. He also recently directed concert readings of Derek Goldman’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Will the Circle be Unbroken with David Strathairn and an adaptation of Helen Prejean’s Death of Innocentsboth at UNCs Memorial Hall. In the last four seasons he has also directed regularly for StreetSigns at Swain Hall, including a new adaptation of Moliere’s The Miser by Elisabeth Lewis Corley, Eric Rosen’s adaptation of Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy, Jim Grimsley’s White People and the world premiere of Jeanmarie Williams’s Vanishing Marion. He has directed readings of new plays at many theatres including New York Theatre Workshop, the O’Neill, the National New Play Network, New Dramatists, and has served Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, Virginia as dramaturg for its new play festival.
CONTACT:
Jonah Garson,
Coordinator, UNC Wright Centennial
jonahgarson@gmail.com
919-619-5467
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