Theatre Professor and Alum to Present at ASTR National Conference

Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy Jeanmarie Higgins will present “The Glas Nocturne: Theatre at Home as Sustainable Production Practice” in the curated paper panel, (On the Way) Home: TRANSience in Performance, Performing TRANSience, at the American Society for Theatre Research conference in Minneapolis, MN, November 3-6. Dr. Higgins’s presentation concerns the 2016 production of Seattle based theatre collective Akropolis Performance Lab’s adaptation of the Swedish modernist novel, Doktor Glas, performed in a ten-seat theatre in Artistic Directors Joseph and Zhenya Lavy’s Seattle home (reviewed by Dr. Higgins here). This research is part of her ongoing inquiry into domestic space and performance, the subject of her monograph in progress, The Domestic Uncanny in Contemporary Performance.

The panel’s three presenters – Higgins, Paul Masters (PhD, Tufts University, 2016), and UNC Charlotte alumna Les Gray (B.A. Theatre, 2012) – are critics of contemporary drama and performance that engage domestic space as an analytic. (Gray’s paper concerns Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, and Masters’s paper concerns Andrew Hoepfner’s immersive participatory performance, Houseworld.) In keeping with the panelists’ interest in domestic space, the presenters will read their papers in shifts for as many auditors as can comfortably attend in one hotel suite.

Alumna Les Gray is currently a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, where she studies with Faedra Chatard Carpenter and Esther Kim Lee.