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POSTPONED: The Center for Fiction and TCG Present Playwright Sarah Ruhl and Composer Matthew Aucoin in Conversation

By Erin Salvi posted 11-08-2021 13:30

  

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. PLEASE STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER UPDATES. 
Headshots of Sarah Ruhl and Matthew Aucoin on either side of the book cover for Eurydice which features a woman in silhouette with an umbrella in front of a blue background.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 8, 2021
 ||  CONTACT: Corinna Schulenburg | cschulenburg@tcg.org | 212-609-5941            
The Center for Fiction and Theatre Communications Group Present
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and Composer Matthew Aucoin in Conversation
Event co-presented with The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY on November 17
Event will be rebroadcast for TCG Books’ First Fridays on December 3

New York, NYThe Center for Fiction, a 200-year-old literary nonprofit that has created an immersive home for readers and writers in downtown Brooklyn, and Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, will co-present Sarah Ruhl and Matthew Aucoin in Conversation on November 17 at 7pm ET at The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217, and via livestream. Composer Matthew Aucoin and playwright Sarah Ruhl recently collaborated on an opera version of Ruhl’s acclaimed play Eurydice. They will discuss their collaboration and the process of transforming the play into a libretto, which was in Ruhl’s words, “one of distillation, with effort and grace.” This event represents the fourth collaboration between The Center and TCG, with past events featuring Jackie Sibblies Drury and Claudia Rankine; Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; and Heidi Schreck and Paula Vogel. The event will then be rebroadcast as part of TCG Books’ First Fridays program on December 3, 2021, at 7pm ET. 

“We’re thrilled to return to The Center for Fiction for our first in-person author event in two years,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director, TCG. “The Center for Fiction is an ideal partner to advance TCG’s conviction that plays are literature and worthy of the same resources, respect, and critical attention as any other form. We look forward to the cross-disciplinary conversation that two visionary artists, Sarah Ruhl and Matthew Aucoin, will share with both in-person and online attendees.”

The event will take place at The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 on Wednesday, November 17, 2021 at 7pm ET. In-person tickets are $10 and include a $10 bookstore voucher, redeemable toward a copy of Eurydice. Livestream options include a $15.95 ticket with a copy of Eurydice or a suggested donation. Learn more and acquire your tickets here. For press tickets, please contact Corinna Schulenburg at cschulenburg@tcg.org

TCG Books’ First Fridays’ will then rebroadcast the event on TCG’s Facebook and YouTube pages on December 3, 2021 at 7pm ET. The inaugural First Friday, held on February 5, 2021, featured Michael R. Jackson in conversation with Max Posner, and the archived video can be found here. The second event was held on March 5, 2021 and featured Dael Orlandersmith in conversation with Neel Keller, and the archived video can be found here. The third event, which was to feature playwright Young Jean Lee, was reimagined to respond to the rise in Anti-Asian violence by featuring Asian and Pacific Islander artists and organizers, including Young Jean. That event was held on April 2 and can be found here. The fourth event, available here, featured Heidi Schreck, author of What the Constitution Means to Me, in conversation with Paula Vogel, and was presented in partnership with The Center for Fiction. The fifth event, available here, featured Larissa FastHorse in conversation with Michael John Garcés. The sixth event, available here, was presented in partnership with publisher 53rd State Press and featured Daniel Alexander Jones in conversation with Emily Morse.

Since its founding in 1984, TCG Books has grown to become North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 18 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama on its book list. The book program commits to the life-long career of its playwrights, keeping all of their plays in print. TCG Books’ authors include: Annie Baker, Nilo Cruz, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Larissa FastHorse, Athol Fugard, Quiara Alegría Hudes, David Henry Hwang, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Heidi Schreck, Stephen Sondheim, Paula Vogel, and August Wilson. TCG Books events are supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Sarah Ruhl’s fifteen plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and her book of essays 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Eurydice, named one of the 25 best American plays of the past 25 years in 2018 by the New York Times, has been developed into an opera with music by Matthew Aucoin, and will be performed at The Metropolitan Opera in November 2021. Her most recent book, Smile: The Story of a Face, was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster. Ruhl teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, and writer. His opera Eurydice, which premiered in 2020 at the Los Angeles Opera, is being produced this November at New York’s The Metropolitan Opera. He is a cofounder of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. Aucoin’s orchestral and chamber music have been commissioned and performed by such artists as Yo-Yo Ma, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich, the Brentano Quartet, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the pianist Kirill Gerstein. His two previous operas, Crossing and Second Nature, have been performed across North America, including productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Canadian Opera Company. As a conductor, Aucoin has appeared with the Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Symphony, The Santa Fe Opera, the San Diego Symphony, the Rome Opera Orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and many other ensembles. Aucoin is the author of The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), a book of reflections on the art form of opera. He is a regular contributor to leading publications including the New York Review of Books and the Atlantic.

The Center for Fiction, now celebrating its 200th year, is a literary nonprofit that brings diverse communities together to develop and share a passion for fiction. Founded as the Mercantile Library of New York in Manhattan, the organization is now based in the heart of the Brooklyn cultural district, with a 18,000 sq. ft. facility that offers New Yorkers an immersive cultural experience centered on reading and writing. Throughout the year, The Center for Fiction provides a vast array of public programming, reading groups, and writing workshops. The First Novel Prize and Emerging Writer Fellowships help build literary careers, and KidsRead/KidsWrite programs inspire an early love of reading and writing in public school students with author-led events. In recent years, the organization’s programming has expanded to include storytelling in all its forms, integrating music, theater, dance, film, television, and the visual arts into its exploration of the best of fiction throughout history and today.

Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, leads for a just and thriving theatre ecology. Since its founding in 1961, TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and over 7,000 Individual Members. Through its programs and services, TCG reaches over one million students, audience members, and theatre professionals each year. TCG offers networking and knowledge-building opportunities through research, communications, and events, including the annual TCG National Conference, one of the largest nationwide gatherings of theatre people; awards grants and scholarships to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 18 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. TCG believes its vision of “a better world for theatre, and a better world because of theatre” can be achieved through individual and collective action, adaptive and responsive leadership, and equitable representation in all areas of practice. TCG is led by executive director and CEO Teresa Eyring and deputy director and COO Adrian Budhu. www.tcg.org.


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