UW-Madison Department of Theatre and Drama faculty members Baron Kelly and Bob Skloot (Emeritus) will be featured panelists for the Alliance of Jewish Theatre’s September webinar entitled “Jewish Theatre – Looking Back, Going Forward.”
From the Alliance’s official description of the discussion:
Renowned maestro and president of Bard College, Leon Botstein said several years ago, “I think what has happened in the U.S. is the normalization of the Jew. They’ve become as complacent and culturally undistinguished as the average, suburban, white middle-class American.
So how is Jewish Theatre able to meet that challenge of “normalization” in light of today’s shifting understandings of race, ethnic diversity, transculturalism, and new forms of religious life? What performances from the past and present can we use to inspire us? This webinar will look back to go forward, in order to project what the future of Jewish Theatre has in store.
The webinar will be held Thursday, September 24 from 7-8:30 PM (Central Time) via Zoom. More information, including how to RSVP, may be found at the Alliance for Jewish Theatre’s website.
Baron Kelly is an internationally recognized critic, historian, practitioner, and scholar. In addition to his long list of acting and directing credits on Broadway and internationally, he is a four-time Fulbright scholar. He has performed for over thirty of America’s regional theatres including Yale Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Guthrie, Mark Taper Forum, and the Oregon, Utah, Dallas Fort Worth, California Shakespeare Festivals. International credits include the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival; National Theatre of Norway; Yermelova Theatre in Moscow, Russia; Edinburgh Theatre Festival. He is a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now professor of theatre, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bob Skloot is the author and editor of many books and essays including the ground-breaking two-volume “The Theatre of the Holocaust” (1981, 1999) and “The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Armenia” (2008). His play If the Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide (2006) has been read around the U.S. and internationally.