Booking and details
Dates Fri, June 7, 2024, 6:30pm
Tickets Free; reservations requested
Please note that our venue for this event has changed and it will now take place in the Founders Room in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Attendees should come to the main entrance located at the corner of 3rd St and East Capitol St SE.
Join Dr. Sasha-Mae Eccleston (Classics, Brown University) Miss Kitty (Water Nymph, Metamorphoses), and Dr. Patricia Akhimie (Director, Folger Institute) in a conversation about the intertwining of Roman mythology with the African diaspora as explored in Folger Theatre’s current production. Topics to be explored will include the voice, the body, the human, and translation.
About the production
Ovid’s classic tales come to astonishing life in Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation where gods and mortals experience love, loss, and transformation.
Juxtaposing the mythic and the modern, the stories of Aphrodite, Midas, Orpheus, Cupid, and others are told in a whimsical and poignant fashion, reminding us of the joys, follies, and heartbreaks of being human.
Metamorphoses was nominated for three Tony Awards in 2002, including “Best Play.”
John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics, Brown University
Sasha-Mae Eccleston
Sasha-Mae Eccleston
Dr. Sasha-Mae Eccleston is a literary scholar currently appointed as the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University. Dr. Eccleston’s work very often traces the parameters of human identity, especially in relation to the gendered, racialized, and/or otherwise non-normative body, other creatures, the natural environment, the built environment, and time. Her forthcoming book, Epic Events: Classics and the Politics of Time in the United States since 9/11 (Yale University Press, 2024), explains how contemporary American engagements with Ancient Greek and Roman literature and material culture reveal time as a structural principle in the differential experience and exercise of citizenship. In view of crises that continue to hierarchize life, Epic Events seeks to make a timely case against classical timelessness.
Dr. Patricia Akhimie
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Miss Kitty
Miss Kitty (Water Nymph) Folger Theatre: debut. Spooky Action Theater: Agreste; Avant Bard Theatre: Suddenly Last Summer, Illyria or What You Will, She Speaks!; Prince George’s Shakespeare in the Parks: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing; Capital Fringe Festival: Brunch with the Boys; Imagination Stage: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Film: A Brighter Tomorrow: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (WILL Interactive), S.P.I.E.S. and S.P.I.E.S. 2 (Imagination Stage/Leapfrog Productions), Shine (ISA Group/Redmon Group Inc.), and the PSA Open to All – Three Words (76 Words/Movement Advancement Project).