Happenings at Jefferson Market Library

By Corinne Neary.

If you missed our first book swap of the year, held on January 10 and 11, you may be the only one! The swap drew the biggest crowds we’ve seen, and brought loads of great book donations from those in attendance. We’ll work on putting together another swap in the spring, once we’ve had a chance to recover from the excitement.

Looking forward, this winter and spring we are leaning into theater, both as live performance and as literature. We’re very excited to welcome back Judith Miller for another four session course, “Rewriting, Repurposing Classical Plays.” Miller is professor emerita of French and collegiate professor of the department of French literature, thought and culture at NYU. She led a course here last year focusing on absurd theater. Her new class will meet all Wednesdays in March at 1 p.m. Registration begins February 18, in-person only, and we’ll give you copies of all four plays which will be read in the course.

Students will read and discuss two of the most performed and appreciated plays of the Western canon: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The group will compare these plays, their interpretations, their possible stagecraft in production, with contemporary rewritings. The goal will be to see how playwrights Wajdi Mouawad, in Scorched (1998), has transformed Oedipus to speak about civil war and family and how Aimé Césaire in A Tempest (1969) has reworked Shakespeare’s The Tempest to speak about colonization and the so-called civilizing mission of European colonialism. This course requires intensive reading and participants will need to have completed Oedipus Rex before the first meeting.

Now for some performances: one-act plays by W.B. Yeats, directed by Alison Armstrong. Armstrong has put on several performances of Yeats’ work at Westbeth, where she is a resident. Now she’s looking forward to sharing these works with an expanded audience in our first floor Willa Cather Room. On Sunday, February 22 at 3 p.m. she’ll be leading performers in Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon, which was first performed 100 years ago, in 1926. Armstrong’s adaptation will feature performers wearing masks by Ralph Lee, the famed late puppeteer and founder of our Halloween parade, who was himself a Westbeth resident. 

In this heavily symbolic play, we imagine a timeless landscape in the west of Ireland. An old Blind Man has been carrying an old Lame Man on country roads for 40 years in search of Saint Colman’s holy well to be cured…or blessed. Three musicians sit off to the side as in the Japanese kyogen comic theater.  Armstrong is a scholar of Irish literature and has published works on Keats and James Joyce. If you enjoy this performance, she’ll also be directing Keats’ The Pot of Broth, coming up on Sunday, May 3. 

As always, check our website for a complete list of upcoming programs, like our book discussions, film screenings, and author readings.