The evolution of the “mythology” of the American family in the theater will be explored in February in a series of events sponsored by Theater Emory and the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL).

A production of Ah, Wilderness! the 1910 classic by Eugene O’Neill, launches the investigation into how the American family has been portrayed on stage throughout the 20th century. The play, directed by John Ammerman, opens Feb. 15 and runs through March 2 at the Mary Gray Munroe Theater at Emory.

In conjunction with Ah, Wilderness!, Theater Emory and the MARIAL Center will co-sponsor a four-day program from Feb. 24-27 called “Staging the American Family: A Symposium on the Evolution of the Idea of Family in 20th Century Drama.” This event combines scholarly discussion and theater, and will include the performance of scenes from nine additional plays –representing the evolving idea of the American family in each decade in the 20th century. Guest speakers will discuss myths and images of the American family in theater and other cultural domains. The readings and lectures are sponsored by the MARIAL Center, which is A Sloan Center on Working Families, funded by the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Theater Emory and the MARIAL Center decided to collaborate because of a shared interest in exploring myths and realities of the American family.

Vincent Murphy, Theater Emory artistic producing director, said the concept of “the Family Project” began in the mid 1990s as faculty and artists pondered the coming millennium. “Inspired by our 1995 world premiere of Steve Murray’s Mileage, which delicately dissected American family life in a post-AIDS environment, we decided to investigate how playwrights had viewed the family throughout the 20th century,” Murphy said.

Murphy contacted several leading playwrights, including Tony Kushner and David Henry Hwang, for suggestions of plays from each decade where the life of the family was vital. He also consulted scholar/artists Michael Evenden, Yvonne Singh and Walter Bilderback.

“Our choices will only sample the thousands of plays devoted to the American family,” said Murphy, an assistant professor of theater. “Rather than focus on one class, race, religion, region or single notion of a nuclear family, we searched for a play and then a scene that best represented the values and concerns of the decade.”

He added that the selections provide “a multifaceted view of the family as it evolves, not one family album or portrait.” The result is “a cubist painting revealing several points of view,” he said.

Bradd Shore, director of the MARIAL Center, said working with Murphy provided an opportunity to explore “one of the arenas of mythmaking about the American family – the theater.”

One way that myths surface and perpetuate is through “public representations we get of ourselves as families,” said Shore, an anthropology professor. “We have a lot of machinery in modern life that pumps out mythic images of family,” including literature, television, film, and advertising, he said. “The theater is a good place to see one of the basic mythologies of American family, but I wanted to broaden our vision.”

Shore said the guest speakers, including playwright David Henry Hwang, Princeton scholar Michael Goldman, advertising visionary Joey Reiman, and Rutgers historian John Gillis will help explore the family’s appearance on stage and beyond.

Gillis is a noted historian of the family who has written several books on family history, the most recent of which is A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values. Gillis argues that we all live in two families. One is the family that we interact with every day. The other is the idealized, mythic model that our culture provides to us. Both have a history.

In his keynote lecture “Our Imagined Families: The Myths and Rituals We Live By,” Professor Gillis “will talk about where our conception of the family comes from,” Shore said. “He’ll set the stage, quite literally, by stepping back and showing us the historical origins of the modern idea of family.”

Goldman, professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, offers a critic’s context to the 10 scenes of family life that will be presented during the conference. One of the most distinguished voices in American dramatic criticism, Goldman’s work has been nominated for the National Book Award. He has twice received the prestigious George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.

Reiman, founder and CEO of BrightHouse, an “ideation corporation,” was for years one of America’s most distinguished and creative advertising executives, having won more than 500 creative awards in national and international competitions, including the Cannes Film Festival. He is an expert on creativity, thinking and new ideas. The author of several books, including Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas That Revitalize Your Business, Career & Life, he also is adjunct professor at the Goizueta Business School and a senior research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Emory.

Hwang was 30 when he became the first Asian-American playwright to win a Tony award in 1988. He received it for his gender-bending Broadway smash M. Butterfly. He has also written screenplays for such A-list directors as Martin Scorsese and Sydney Pollack. He will participate in a panel discussion with Gillis and Goldman, moderated by Michael Evenden, associate professor and chair of Emory’s department of Theater Studies.

Shore said the purpose of the panel is to broaden the discussion beyond the theater. “In modern life we don’t have just a single myth of family. We have a very diverse media that produce mythic images of family. One is high art, such as literature, which theater is part of. The theater has been central in giving us the pictures of family. That’s one arena. But how do these theatrical myths compare with popular culture, television and advertising? These are the other arenas of myth production,” Shore said.

The MARIAL Center is one of six Sloan Centers on Working Families, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program on Dual-Career Working Middle Class Families. The Emory Center focuses its research on the functions and significance of ritual and myth in dual wage-earner, middle-class families in the American South, with the aim of understanding how family cultures are produced and reproduced under conditions of modern working life.

The Center has four basic purposes: to promote scholarly studies of myth and ritual among working families in the Southeastern United States; to train the next generation of scholars to focus attention on American middle-class families; to publicize findings through scholarly channels and more broadly through the media; and to find ways to use the insights gained from research to encourage and foster positive social change. For more information, please go to www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/MARIAL/index.html

Theater Emory is the producing organization of Emory University and is affiliated with the Department of Theater Studies. It is a constituent member of the Theater Communications Group, Inc., the national association of nonprofit professional theaters, and a member of the Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts. It operates under a season agreement with Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.

The symposium, Staging the American Family, will comprise the following events:

Feb. 15 through March 2
Ah, Wilderness!
by Eugene O’Neill
Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Directed by John Ammerman

With this 1910 classic, Theater Emory launches an investigation into how American family life has been portrayed on the stage throughout the twentieth century. O’Neill’s warm and insightful coming-of-age comedy and a series of readings of scenes from each decade are scheduled as Theater Emory collaborates with Emory’s MARIAL (Myth and Ritual in American Life) Center.

Dobbs University Center (DUC)
605 Asbury Circle
Atlanta

Fri, Feb 15, 2002 7:30 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Sat, Feb 16, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Sun, Feb 17, 2002 3:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Thu, Feb 21, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Fri, Feb 22, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Sat, Feb 23, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Sun, Feb 24, 2002 3:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Thu, Feb 28, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Fri, Mar 1, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Sat, Mar 2, 2002 3:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater
Sat, Mar 2, 2002 8:00 PM DUC Mary Gray Munroe Theater

Charges
General Admission $15; Emory students w/ ID $7.50
For more information
Contact: Rosalind Staib
Phone: (404) 727-7212
Email Address: rstaib@emory.edu

Sun., Feb. 24:
Keynote Lecture
Our Imagined Families: The Myths and Rituals We Live By
7:30 p.m.
Mary Gray Munroe Theater

"Our Imagined Families: The Myths and Rituals We Live By," a keynote lecture by John Gillis, professor of history at Rutgers University. He is author of several books on family history, including Youth and History, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the present and, most recently, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values.

Mon., Feb. 25:
The American Family on Stage: A Decade-by-Decade Look at the Evolution of the Family
7:30 p.m.
Mary Gray Munroe Theater

Actors will read short scenes from 10 plays chosen to exemplify the American family throughout the 20th century.
The plays are:

Ah, Wilderness! By Eugene O’Neill
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson
The Silver Cord by Sidney Howard
Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepherd
The Dining Room by A.R. Guerney
How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel

Tues., Feb. 26
Lecture
A Critical Look at the American Family in the Theater
7:30 p.m.
Mary Gray Munroe Theater

Michael Goldman, professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, will talk about the scenes performed the day before. After his remarks, the audience has a chance to see some of the scenes deconstructed, rearranged and improvised.

Wed., Feb. 27
Panel Discussion
Myth America: Diverse Arenas of Mythmaking on the American Family
7:30 p.m.
Mary Gray Munroe Theater

Panel discussion, moderated by Michael Evenden, associate professor and chair of Emory’s department of Theater Studies. Participants include John Gillis, Michael Goldman, Joey Reiman and David Henry Hwang. The panel will discuss mythic images of the family, not only in the theater, but in other arenas, such as popular culture, television and advertising.

< Back to MARIAL Calendar of Events