When: Thursday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, April 21, at 5:00 p.m., and Saturday, April 22, at 2:00 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.
Where: Black Box Theatre, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts
[In the premiere of her play Life Sentence, writer/director Gloria Majule '17] takes a conventionally white format in American theatre, the family drama, and flips it on its head with radically inclusive casting by personalizing it within her own country, Tanzania.
Majule spent her most recent summer back home where she developed a lot of the play, drawing inspiration from facets of the culture. The re-entry shock was powerful at the axis of her racial identity as well as gender. “Being a woman is like a life sentence, it’s like a punishment,” she recounted.
The department must be lauded for their most recent season that boasts entirely female playwrights, a feat easily accomplished but rarely executed. Majule sits alongside some of the most lauded feminist playwrights of modern theatre — Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, Naomi Wallace — and picks up the baton with three featured roles for women that give the actors much more to work with than the all-too-common Papier-mâché cutouts that dominate female representation on stage.
The full article appears in The Cornell Daily Sun.
