About What of the Night (Off-Broadway)
Can we ever see through the fog of passion to find the truth? Aged, secluded for forty years in her Greenwich Village apartment, a renowned American poet/novelist is haunted by the memories of her expatriate years in Paris during the thirties. The feverish passion for her lover at the time, another woman, is rekindled before our eyes.
Novelist. Playwright. Journalist. Poet. Djuna Barnes was master of many genres, a writer with sharp satiric wit, a great sense of contradiction and an anguished vision of the world. Barnes rose to fame in 1936 as the acclaimed novelist of Nightwood—her magnum opus and story of a doomed, tempestuous love affair with Thelma Wood. Discovered by T. S. Eliot, Nightwood was considered a masterpiece of modern fiction and caught the attention of the literary scene after the manuscript was rejected by nearly every publisher for its narrative style, metaphoric language and underlying themes of sexual perversion, lesbian romance and religious blasphemy.
Co-author and star Jane Alexander says, “The impetus for What of the Night came out of our desire to capture in the theater, one of the most elusive literary figures of the twentieth century and at the same time, to examine how memory operates in the mind of a writer who used her life as the basis of her art.”
Djuna Barnes's destructive childhood led to a complicated adult life in avant-garde social circles throughout Paris and the center of New York City bohemia—Greenwich Village. Her contemporaries included playwright Eugene O'Neill, authors James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, painter Marcel Duchamp, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and actor/director Charlie Chaplin. Barnes was sent by McCalls magazine to Paris in 1921, where she remained for almost 20 years. It was during that time she met and fell in love with Thelma Wood.
Don't miss this remarkable, virtuoso tour-de-force by one of the most revered artists of our time!
