Who Was Mark Twain?: A Dramatic Consideration of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain’s unforgettable characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—and Twain himself—are truly comprehended and vibrantly alive through this presentation! Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, showed: “Huckleberry Finn itself represents a question which is always around: how to be spontaneous, seemingly natural, oneself; and yet go along with what other people seem to ask of you. That is a very hard question.” This dramatic presentation, which has us see and feel the beauty of Mark Twain’s novel, also contains a definitive, compassionate understanding of one of America’s most esteemed writers.
The Civil War, Unions, & Our Lives!
In this stirring, exciting production you’ll see how the Civil War has to do with the personal life and thoughts of everyone—and with what America and unions are in the very midst of! The event will include Civil War songs, a dramatic reading of Eli Siegel’s historic talk on Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days & the Civil War, Civil War poems by Eli Siegel, and “What the Civil War Was About” by Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss: “There has been a desire on the part of Southerners and others to say that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states’ rights. However, the much romanticized ‘lost cause’ of the South was slavery, period. To understand how slavery could be seen as a ‘right,’ we have to understand contempt, including in ourselves.”
Dickens’ Hard Times; or, What Does a Person Deserve?
“Dickens had been born in the world of coaches, and yet he felt, ‘Coketown, economics, strikes, unions—they have something to do with the hearts of people, the deepest things in people.’…Bounderby is a representation of people who are afflicting and dirtying and lying about the world now: persons who make their own selfishness into a national achievement, who make their own lack of feeling into a world asset, who use all kinds of beautiful terms to hide their own grabbingness and hypocrisy….The big thing about this book is its courage, along with the Dickens charm, and the subtlety. It shows so much of what Aesthetic Realism is interested in—the heart of man, the ethics of man in all times.” —Eli Siegel
Gwe: Young Man of New Guinea
a novel against racism
A dramatic reading of selections from the novel by anthropologist Arnold Perey, PhD. —with music & original photographs—
“Gwe was born in Stone Age New Guinea. Alan was born in New York City. This is their story and the story of Gwe’s people. You’ll take a trip to the heart of Papua New Guinea, to the mountains, peaceful and turbulent, where Gwe lives.You’ll experience, as close to you as your fingertips, an ancient culture, real people, and real events. The anthropology of this book is authentic.” For announcement, click here.