Purge, Purify, Clarify

Please join us for the research presentation of R. Darren Gobert, Professor of English and Theatre & Performance Studies at York University, Canada. Professor Gobert specializes in comparative modern and contemporary Western drama, dramatic and performance theory, and the philosophy of theater. As a teacher, he has won a Dean's Award for Outstanding Teaching and his university's highest honor, the President's University-Wide Teaching Award. As a theater practitioner, he has written stage adaptations and directed plays by Albee, Beckett, Chekhov, and others. As a writer, his work includes The Theatre of Caryl Churchill (Bloomsbury) and The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford UP), which was awarded both the Ann Saddlemyer Prize from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research from the American Society for Theatre Research. He is Editor of Modern Drama.

Abstract: In cities across the world, playwright David Greig and director Ramin Gray have collaborated with amateur, volunteer casts to address-and soothe-the tragedies of gun violence (The Events, 2013- ) and forced migration (The Suppliant Women, 2016- ). "Purge, Purify, Clarify" situates their project in the cultural history of "catharsis," considering the various and contradictory ways that the phenomenon has been said to work.