Avra Sidiropoulou: Addressing an Age of Upheaval

Karen [Malpede’s] use of the play [Troy Too] happens in a most amazing and in a structurally brilliant way. She puts two goddesses that appear to teach us a lesson about how lives need to be re-configured. She also uses the story of The Trojan Women, a story of one nation turned against another, to tell us that even in these circumstances that we’re living in, these really turbulent times, there is a sense of solidarity that needs to be built among these women and these people, in general, who have been forced to leave their homes, be exiled, who have suffered the violence of the authorities…In a very subtle and beautifully poetic way The Trojan Women and the words of Euripides come together and blend with the rhythms of today’s world and of the city of New York, that has had its own share of violence, misfortune, tragedies, in the 21st century.
 

My work has always been about bringing people together, forging new transcultural and transnational artistic relationships, and combining research with theatre-making in order to explore and extend the limits of creativity.

Avra Sidiropoulou is a theatre director and academic. She is the Artistic Director of Persona Theatre Company. She has published extensively on directing theory and practice, contemporary performance and dramaturgy and is the author of Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method (Routledge 2018) In 2020 she was nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award by the League of Professional Theatre Women.

She is also the co-editor of Adapting Greek Tragedy. Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts(CUP 2021) and editor of Staging 21 st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics and Global Crisis (Routledge, 2022) In Spring 2023 she will be a Visiting Scholar at the School of the Arts of Columbia University in New York.

Avra holds a PhD degree in Theatre Studies (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), an M.F.A. in Directing (Columbia University), an MPhil in American Literature (Cambridge University) and an M.A. in Text and Performance (King’s College London). Her main areas of scholarly specialization include directing theory, the ethics of adaptation, contemporary dramaturgy and practice as research. She was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, the Martin E. Segal Centre at CUNY, MIT, the Universities of Leeds and Surrey, the Institute of Theatre Studies at Freie University, the Berlin and a Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Tokyo.

Theater Three Collaborative in New York and Persona Theater Company in Athens, two companies known for their social justice work, will present the world premiere of Karen Malpede‘s Troy Too, a poetic play in dialogue with Euripides’ The Trojan Women and the current crises of Covid, climate change, and racism. Directed by Avra Sidiropoulou, Troy Too’s multiracial cast features one of Greece’s finest classical actresses, Lydia Koniordou, who brings a modern and ancient Hecuba to life in English and ancient Greek.

This limited engagement runs May 11-21, 2023 at HERE (145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan). Tickets are now on sale at HERE Arts Center 

Crafted in the heat of 2020 from language found on the streets during the protests for racial justice, in hospitals during the Covid lockdown, and from the mouths of endangered fish in the sea, Troy Too is an enraged and poignant play of what we have survived, and a poetic elegy for those who did not. Greek director Sidiropoulou, known for her innovative multimedia staging of modern and classical texts, brings Troy Too shockingly alive in an international production that cuts across languages and cultures. The play, one of the first to tackle the Covid pandemic, is an angry yet beautiful communal lament, one that has been lacking from public life.

Persona is a state of mind, a heart that beats with inspiration, a body that balances harmoniously but also irregularly, a team that experiments, adapts and transcends, simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal. It is a small hub of talent which was established in Athens several years ago as a way to keep us all connected to what is going on in the arts internationally.

Persona Theatre Company Fund Raising Campaign

Avra Sidiropoulou: https://persona.gr/en/people/avra-sidiropoulou/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/avrasid

Persona Theatre Company:  https://persona.gr/en/

Youtube Persona Theatre Company: https://www.youtube.com/@personatheatercompany4935

Pamela S.K. Glasner: Fighting for Fairness

Getting my Masters at Harvard at age sixty-nine, I hope that I’m inspiring other women that there are no limits. There’s absolutely no limits except for those you place on yourself. I never actually wrote a screenplay and now all these Film Festivals think I’m such a great writer.. . There’s always a first time for everything. Why not me?

“If you want to reach people—REALLY reach them—you have to touch their hearts. Art is what does that. And my art is my writing.”

Pamela S. K. Glasner is a critically acclaimed published author of fiction and non-fiction, a filmmaker, a playwright, a social advocate. She is also a proud member of the Writer’s Guild of America, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, the Connecticut Historical Society and Grace Episcopal Church. Additionally, she is a Registered Reader at both the Royal Society of London and the British Library.

As the daughter of two senior citizens who were exploited and abused by a stranger who insinuated himself into their lives for the sole purpose of embezzling their life savings, Glasner produced Last Will and Embezzlement, her ground-breaking and award-winning documentary. Starring Hollywood’s icon, the late Mickey Rooney, the film explores the financial exploitation of the elderly. In Glasner’s frustrating and ultimately futile struggle to obtain justice for her parents, she learned how prevalent these crimes are and how safe from prosecution and conviction the perpetrators are. For that reason, Glasner lectures nationally on the topic, teaching people how to protect themselves and those they love and/or care for from the countless vultures who are always waiting in the wings.

Hollywood icon, the late Mickey Rooney, was an American film actor and entertainer whose film, television, and stage appearances span nearly his entire lifetime. He was awarded one Oscar (“In recognition of his 50 years of versatility in a variety of memorable film performances”) and was nominated for four others. He won several other awards including a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Working as a performer since he was a small child, Mickey had one of the longest careers of any actor, spanning almost 90 years. Before he passed away in April of 2014, he was the last surviving male star from1930s Hollywood.

On March 2, 2011 Mickey testified before the United States Congress when they were considering legislation meant to curb elder abuse. He told the members of the special Senate committee that he was financially exploited by a family member, though he refused to publicly name his abuser. Not long after, Mickey’s finances were permanently entrusted into the hands of a Conservator in order to protect what remained, and to attempt to recover the missing money, which was a considerable amount. Sadly, in the end, after a protracted legal battle, his perpetrators returned a tiny fraction of what they had stolen.

Glasner’s non-fiction book, Silver and Gold, the companion piece to Last Will, was written in honor of her deceased parents and released on what would have been her father’s 93rd birthday.
She is also the bookwriter and co-composer/co-lyricist of Empty Rooms, a musical play which was endorsed by Joey Nederlander (of the world-famous Broadway producers). In his Detroit home he told her, “Your work is as good as anything I’ve ever heard on the strip.”

Her other advocacy work centers around Finding Emmaus, her historically and factually accurate novel which explores the treatment and mistreatment of the mentally ill over the course of about 350 years, and how society marginalizes and victimizes those deemed to be ‘different’ (aka ‘less than’).

Glasner earned her Bachelor’s Degree as a Dean’s List student from Eastern Connecticut State University and received her Masters in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University. She attributes her love of architecture and antique restoration—two aspects of her life which are woven into the fabric of Finding Emmaus—to her grandfather who, after emigrating to the US from Austria in the 1920’s, became an iron worker and joined the ranks of those who left their legacy in the form of New York City’s incomparable skyline. But her real hero, though gone more than forty years, is still her grandmother, whose strength, courage and unfailing faith taught her that “nothing and no one can keep you from your heart’s desire without your permission and your cooperation.”


Presently, Ms. Glasner resides in rural Connecticut where she continues working on several new projects and advocating for those who don’t always have a voice of their own.

Ms. Glasner’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pamela.glasner

Ms. Glasner’s Huffington Post Page: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/pamela-glasner

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4127649/

“Full Moon Dog Festival” official website: http://www.fullmoondog.com/