TALE OF TWO CITIES- ADAPTED FROM CHARLES DICKENS BY BRENDAN PELSUE

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Tale of Two Cities workshop sharing - Playwright Brendan Pelsue is visiting UBC for a one-week development workshop of his contemporary theatrical adaptation of Charles' Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. In collaboration with 10 UBC students, Brendan and director Leora Morris (assistant professor, Department of Theatre and Film) will use this week to continue to evolve the text and experiment with possible theatrical forms and containers. Join us on Saturday night as we conclude our week of workshops by sharing some excerpts from the play and/or using the presence of an audience to experiment with some elements of the production that involve direct address. A short facilitated Q&A will follow. 

PLAYWRIGHT'S BIO

Brendan Pelsue is a playwright, librettist, and translator whose work has been produced in New York and regionally. His play Wellesley Girl premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Hagoromo, a dance-opera for which he wrote the libretto, appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Pocantico Center, and was the first-round ballot nominee for a Grammy Award. Recent projects include a new translation and adaptation of Molière’s Don Juan at Westport Country Playhouse and Read to Me at Portland Stage, which won the 2019 Clauder Prize. He is currently working on One Thousand Years of Sacred Music and Two Americans, a chamber opera, for Theater Emory, as well as a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities for The Alliance. Commissions include South Coast Repertory, American Opera Projects, Westport Country Playhouse, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He was a 2017 artist-in-residence at Château de la Napoule, France, where he produced the podcast We Are Not These People.  Originally from Newburyport, MA, he received his MFA from the Yale School of Drama and his BA from Brown University, where he received the Weston Prize in playwriting. He teaches at Rutgers University. 

[www.brendanpelsue.com]