Talk by Leigh Fondakowski on her work SPILL

Thursday, October 30, 2014 at 7:00pm
CFA Hall

FREE!

Center for the Arts Director Pamela Tatge discusses the development of the work “SPILL” by Leigh Fondakowski on the Center for the Arts blog here.

Playwright Leigh Fondakowski will discuss the development of her newest work, SPILL, a multimedia play about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She will discuss how she researched the work through interviews with Louisiana community members affected by the disaster and how she transformed that information into a theatrical work. She will also discuss her collaboration with visual artist Reeva Wortel.

Leigh Fondakowski was the Head Writer of The Laramie Project and has been a member of Tectonic Theatre Project since 1995. She is an Emmy nominated co-screenwriter for the adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO, and a co-writer of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. In 2011, she was commissioned by the Center for the Arts’ Feet to the Fire Initiative to create the work SPILL, which tells the stories of people and communities devastated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She was inspired to write the work following the THEAT/ENV course she co-taught with Wesleyan’s Director of the College of the Environment Barry Chernoff. The first staged reading of SPILL was done in Fayerweather Beckham Hall at Wesleyan in February 2012. SPILL had its world premiere in March 2014 at the Reilly Theater at Louisiana State University, performed by Baton Rouge’s Swine Palace. In this talk, Ms. Fondakowski will discuss how the play developed from the first interviews she did in Louisiana with Wesleyan students, to the premiere this past spring.

An Outside the Box Theater Series event presented by the Theater Department and the Center for the Arts.