In the nine week interval between our July and September gatherings of The Nora Salon, the Nora’s team has been busy! Here’s what some of our members were up to over the summer break:
In July, Nora’s Playhouse Literary Curator Sharon Friedman had two papers focused on women playwrights presented at Border Crossings: Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Translatantic & the Transpacific, a conference in Bordeaux, France sponsored by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). The first paper, Re-Presenting the Wages of War: Interrogating the Boundaries between Fact and Truth in the War Plays by Helen Benedict and Paula Vogel, was presented as part of the panel Crossing Genres in Plays by American Women organized by the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS). It examines two theatrical productions by women writers that have worked with returning soldiers to bring their stories to the stage: Helen Benedict’s The Lonely Soldier Monologues and Paula Vogel’s Don Juan Returns from Iraq. The second, Recruits in the ‘Army of Women’: Mary Heaton Vorse and Susan Glaspell, presented as part of the panel Beyond Borders: Susan Glaspell and her Sisters from the Provincetown Players for the International Susan Glaspell Society (ISGS), examines the intersections and intertextualities in the life and works of labor journalist, political organizer, and international feminist Mary Heaton Vorse, whose Provincetown wharf provided the original stage for the Provincetown Players in 1915, and Susan Glaspell, founding member and one of the principal playwrights for the Players. (Sharon sits on the board of ISGS.)
