Pathetic: Staging Women’s Desire with Julia Jarcho and Minor Theater

6:30pm Reading + Panel
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.

This June, downtown NYC company Minor Theater presents Pathetic, a new take on Racine’s classic Phèdre at Abrons Arts Center. Racine’s queen destroys everything with her monstrous lust; in Pathetic, neoclassical hexameter meets contemporary teen drama as the heroine becomes a bored mom with an ax to grind. In anticipation of the premiere, OBIE-winning playwright/director Julia Jarcho invites fellow artists to consider what can happen when women’s desire gets a voice onstage. What new forms become possible when women appropriate the conjunction of sex and violence, which has traditionally been directed against us? How do we forge a lustful stage poetics of our own? And come to think of it, who is this “we”? The evening will feature readings from Jarcho’s plays, including Pathetic and Grimly Handsome (2013), followed by a discussion with choreographer, performer, and writer Okwui Okpokwasili (MacArthur Fellow, 2018) and other avant-garde luminaries, moderated by Frank Hentschker.