Of Government

Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 8:00pm
CFA Theater

$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, and youth under 18.

Friday, November 8, 2024 at 8:00pm
CFA Theater

$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, and youth under 18.

Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 2:00pm
CFA Theater

$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, and youth under 18.

Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 8:00pm
CFA Theater

$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, and youth under 18.

Does government have a gender? What if we gendered it differently?
—Agnes Borinsky, playwright

Katie Pearl, Assistant Professor of Theater, directs Agnes Borinsky’s Of Government (2017)—a queer and hopeful play about making theater and making society. Our piano-playing host Ms. Marjorie Blaine and a cast of loveable oddballs—including Barb the Teacher, Deb the Seeker, Heidi the Helper, Tawny the Addict, and Heather the Capitalist—lead us through a handmade civic pageant featuring a mermaid musicale alongside scenes and songs of breakdown and possibility. If the question is “what is government?” then we’re just gonna figure it out together. With sequins.

Agnes Borinsky (she/they) is a writer, performer, and theater-maker based in Los Angeles. She is interested in the unintended transformations that become possible when the things we’ve planned fail. Her projects include many plays, including "The Trees," "A Song of Songs," and "Ding Dong It’s the Ocean," the experiments in participation "Working Group for a New Spirit" and "Weird Classrooms," and the fiction novel "Sasha Masha." She has made work in collaboration with theater institutions such as Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, and Clubbed Thumb, and outside of them in basements, backyards, circus tents, community centers, and online. 

Read Students, Faculty Explore Intersection of Art and Politics in The Wesleyan Connection.

This event is part of “Democracy 2024” at Wesleyan. Learn more about how the University is fostering the democratic values and practices that make free inquiry and teaching possible at www.wesleyan.edu/d2024.

Above: Illustration by Sida Chu ’26