Video / Audio  Playwriting

Dramatic art arose as a means of reckoning with war. The earliest known Greek plays were written by military veterans and performed by a chorus of young conscripts, dramatizing episodes from the Trojan War, before an Athenian audience whose lives were directly touched by military conflict. The 21st-century has seen a profusion of plays grappling with war on North American stages, written and performed under very different conditions. This roundtable event brings together a panel of playwrights whose innovative work has stimulated the expanding corpus of “war plays” -- Judith Thompson (Palace of the End), George Brant (Grounded), and Stephan Wolfert (Cry Havoc). They will reflect on the enduring power of live dramatic performance for thinking through contemporary culture's relationship to war, and consider what new forms and strategies are needed to face war's new realities.

David Henry Hwang, Tony award-winning playwright of such plays as M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Golden Child, and Chinglish, visited Columbia to discuss his work, including Kung Fu (inspired by the life of Bruce Lee), which will premiere this spring at the Signature Theatre Company. Joining him in conversation was theater director and Columbia professor Gregory Mosher, former head of both the Lincoln Center and Goodman Theatres, and Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia and a prominent theater scholar.