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NH Theatre Project presents The Rest ...
Description
NH Theatre Project presents at The Music Hall Maria Irene Fornes is one of America’s greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, yet very few actually know of her. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds onstage and taught countless students how to connect with their imaginations. When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off. The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright's remembered past and their shared present. Theater luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes' important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting. Post-show Q&A with filmmaker Michelle Memran hosted live by Monte Bohanan Michelle Memran is a filmmaker and journalist. For nearly twenty years she has worked as a reporter and researcher in New York City and has written for numerous publications.Her award-winning documentary feature debut, The Rest I MakeUp, had its world premiere at MoMA's Doc Fortnight in 2018, and returned for a sold-out week-long run at MoMA later that year. It was named one of "The Best Movies of 2018" and is currently screening worldwide. Through her enlightening, uplifting and at times heartbreaking documentary, Memran takes us on a ride through Fornés’s remarkable life—including recent trips to Cuba to visit family she hasn’t seen for a long time, and wonderful reminiscences of plays and performances gone by, their presence palpable even now. Memran’s personal connection to Fornés’s work and life becomes very clear, the two forming a tender partnership rare to see in a documentary. “Intimate and exhilarating...unfolds the details of [Fornés and Memran’s] decade-plus collaboration in ample, illuminating discussions.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker