Play Performance and Discussion: In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)
Thursday, April 6, 2017 | 7:30 PM | Davis Performing Arts Center, Georgetown University Main Campus
Hosted by the Georgetown University Gender+ Justice Initiative and Theater & Performance Studies Program.
Join us for a performance of Sarah Ruhl’s play In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play followed by a discussion with director and professor Derek Goldman and Professor of Law Nan Hunter, moderated by Professor Denise Brennan.
Written by celebrated MacArthur Award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl, this Pulitzer Prize finalist play also received three 2010 Tony Award nominations for its Broadway production, including Best New Play. Set in a seemingly perfect, well-to-do Victorian home, proper gentleman and scientist Dr. Givings has innocently invented an extraordinary new device for treating “hysteria” in women (and occasionally men): the vibrator. Adjacent to the doctor’s laboratory, his young and energetic wife tries to tend to their newborn daughter— and wonders exactly what is going on in the next room. This production wraps up the Georgetown University Theater & Performance Studies Program’s 2016-17 season: Discover and Celebrate.
Pre-Show Lobby Talk – 7:30 PM
Performance – 8:00 PM
Post-Show Conversation – following the performance
About the speakers:
Derek Goldman is an award-winning stage director, playwright/adapter, developer of new work, educator, and published scholar, whose artistic work has been seen around the country, Off-Broadway, and internationally. His work has been produced and developed at theaters such as Steppenwolf, Lincoln Center, Arena Stage, CenterStage, Folger, Round House, Everyman, Theater J, Mosaic, Synetic, the Kennedy Center, Ford’s Theater, McCarter, Segal Center (Montreal), Northern Stage, Forum, Olney Theater Center (where he is an Artistic Associate), and others. He is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University where he is co-Director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, which he founded with Ambassador Cynthia Schneider with the mission of harnessing the power of performance to humanize global politics. From 2007-2016, he served as Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown.
He is a Founding Director of Unesco’s UNITWIN Global Network of Higher Education in the Performing Arts (based in Shanghai), and a partner with TCG on the creation of the Global Theatre Initiative. He is also Founding Artistic Director of the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, an award-winning professional theatre founded in Chicago and now based in Chapel Hill NC. He is the author of more than 30 professionally produced plays and adaptations, including work published by Samuel French, and he has directed more than 80 productions. His original play about Polish War hero Jan Karski, featuring David Strathairn, was recently presented at the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and in residence at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC. He received his Ph. D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. In 2016 he received the prestigious President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers.
Nan Hunter is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Hunter’s primary scholarship has spanned three areas: state regulation of sexuality and gender, health law, and federal courts and procedure. Her work has been published in numerous law journals, and several of her articles have been selected for reprinting in anthologies. She is co-author of a casebook on sexuality, gender and the law soon to be in its fourth edition. Her most recent scholarship focuses on law and social movements.
From 2011 to 2016, Professor Hunter served as Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at Georgetown Law. In addition to Georgetown, she has taught as a full-time or visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School, Harvard Law School, the University of Miami Law School, and UCLA Law School.
Prior to starting her career in law teaching, Professor Hunter was a member of the national legal staff of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, specializing in constitutional and civil rights law. She was the founding Director of the LGBT Rights Project of the ACLU, after having worked as a staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. She also served as Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration. In 1997, President Clinton appointed her to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. Professor Hunter is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. In 2000, she was honored by the American Foundation for AIDS Research as a “Civil Rights Pioneer.”
About the moderator:
Denise Brennan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her most recent book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States, follows the lives of the first trafficking survivors in the United States. Prof. Brennan is also the author of What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic and currently is writing Undocumented: Criminalizing Everyday Life in the United States. Prof. Brennan is an Advisor to the Best Practices Policy Project, and has been a board member of Different Avenues, and HIPS — organizations that work to protect the rights of people who engage in the sex sector. She also founded the Survivor Leadership Training Fund to provide support for trafficking survivor-advocates.
