Front cover from Four Arab Hamlet Plays

Monday, March 14
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Reading + Discussion

FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.

Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. This new Segal Center publication Four Arab Hamlet Plays  samples that tradition with works by Nabyl Lahlou (Ophelia is Not Dead, Morocco, 1968), Mamduh Adwan (Hamlet Wakes Up Late, Syria, 1976), Nader Omran (A Theatre Company Found a Theatre and Theatred “Hamlet”, Jordan, 1984), Jawad al-Assadi (Forget Hamlet, Iraq, 1994), plus an autobiographical sketch by Mahmoud Aboudoma (“Gamlet” is Russian for “Hamlet”, Egypt, 2006). Edited and translated by Marvin Carlson and Margaret Litvin, with Joy Arab. Additional full translation by Khalid Amine, as well as translation contributions by Michael LoCicero and George Potter.

Featuring an excerpted reading from Four Arab Hamlet Plays directed by Rebekah Maggor. Followed by a Skype session with Margaret Litvin, and discussion and Q & A with Marvin Carlson.

Marvin Carlson is the Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research and teaching interests include dramatic theory and Western European theatre history and dramatic literature, especially of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He has been awarded the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George Jean Nathan Prize, the Barnard Hewitt Award, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University, a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universitat of Berlin, and a Fellow of the American Theatre. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Athens. His best-known book, Theories of the Theatre (Cornell University Press, 1984), has been translated into seven languages. His 2001 book, The Haunted Stage won the Callaway Prize. His newest book is Four Arab Hamlet Plays (Martin E. Segal Center Publications 2015).

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University (USA) and founder of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program in Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. She is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011). Her articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in journals of Arabic literature, Shakespeare studies, and theatre. She holds a PhD in Social Thought from the University of Chicago and a BA in Humanities from Yale. During the 2015-6 year she is an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden, researching the literary impact of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet educational and cultural ties, a project for which she has also been awarded a Peter Paul Career Development Professorship at BU and a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Rebekah Maggor is a director, translator, performer, playwright, and scholar. Her plays and translations have had readings and productions at the American Repertory Theater, the New York Theater Workshop, the Old Vic in London, the Huntington Theatre Company, the Segal Theatre Center, among others. Maggor has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for literature in translation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Global Connections Program through TCG, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Building Bridges Program, and the Fulbright Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program. She is co-editor and co-translator of the forthcoming anthology Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution (June, 2016, Seagull Books). She has taught theatre and performance at Vanderbilt University and Harvard University and is currently an affiliated scholar at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. aoiagency.com/rebekah-maggor