Online-Only Sunday, August 30 at 3:00 pm (CDT)
We launch our “Essential” 13th performance season this Sunday, August 30 with the first of nine Coger Literary Salons titled Take Upon’s the Mystery of Things: Classical Creativity in Quarantine.
Please join us for this special 45-minute Salon, presented online-only beginning at 3:00 pm (CDT), as we seek out history’s classical creations from within isolation as inspirations for our own modern quarantine and pandemic.
Curated by TSC Founder and Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary, Classical Creativity in Quarantine is part of the company’s larger, new performance project for the year: The Dr. Greta McCormick Coger Literary Salon Series.
McCleary leads the Salon of narratives, classical performances, poetry, and correspondence with TSC company actors Darius Wallace, Stephanie Shine, Michael Khanlarian, and Carmen-maria Mandley.
Inspired by TSC’s annual Southern Literary Salons, the recent digital Decameron Project during the Spring shut-down, and long-time patron Dr. Greta Coger, the Series will feature a host of Salons through January that explore important authors and subjects close to home.
Unlike the other eight Salons, Classical Creativity in Isolation will be presented only online with the actors live in their own isolated physical spaces. For a $15 digital ticket, patrons will receive a specific password via email on August 30 prior to the event that will enable them to log into the digital Salon.
“We are not the first humans to suffer death, quarantines, and loss of work and wealth due to a health pandemic,” says McCleary. “But there is one occupation that always faces the dangerous unknown: the Creative. What can we learn from them in our own time of social distancing and restricted gatherings?”
The Salon will explore more than 20 creations and creators who persevered through their own restrictions, isolations, quarantines, censorships, and imprisonments to bring the world discoveries, beauty, inspirations, and revolutions: Cervantes, Galileo, Thoreau, Malcolm X, Beethoven, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frida Kahlo, Giovanni Boccaccio, Vaclav Havel, Frederick Douglass, Anne Frank, Edvard Munch, Allen Ginsberg, and William Shakespeare and his plays King Lear, Coriolanus, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and All’s Well That Ends Well.
“I don’t care for live theatres being classified as ‘non-essential’ this year, McCleary says. “I say that with positive energy. Theatre holds communities together, and can save us. History’s creative class and our brilliant innovators have shown us the way. They did not give up. They used their imaginations, which they already were exercising on a daily basis, to find a way to another thought, possibility, a discovery, another perspective. I want theatre to find a way right now. I feel it is TSC’s job as the region’s professional, classical theatre to produce and provide inspiration and to encourage communication and compassion.
“Look, there is Dr. King in 1963 in a Birmingham jail with everyone against his peaceful protests, even the country’s clergy, yet in his violent isolation he crafts a letter that I consider the most moving and influential of the 20th Century. It should be mandatory reading for us all. There is Beethoven going increasingly deaf in his last 25 years yet finding a way to ‘hear’ his music with 22 unique hand-written symbols that only this year did we discover the meanings of. He told us then that his music was only for later audiences. Visual artist Frida Kahlo endured over 30 physical surgeries and 24 different kinds of corsets to correct her spine. She didn’t surrender. She emerged.
“There is Shakespeare! It’s a miracle he survived infancy. Just after he was born, the plague killed 20% of Stratford’s citizens. And between 1606 and 1610, we estimate the playhouses were open for only nine months due to the plague. What did he do? He wrote Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. Probably parts of King Lear, too, which is the source of the first part of our Salon’s title.
“Greta Coger, our acting company, and TSC’s Board offer this effort to Americans with a message of creative inspiration and encouragement.”
Purchase $15 digital tickets online at www.tnshakespeare.org or by calling (901) 759-0604. Open Monday-Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm. This Salon will show only once on TSC’s website with time-stamped, specific password provided to patrons on the day of the Salon. There are no refunds/exchanges. The digital waiting room opens 15 minutes prior to curtain. Credit Card charges require a $1 per-ticket fee.
Season 13 Sponsors and Partners
TSC’s generous sponsors and partners of its season, productions, and Education and Outreach Program include International Paper, ArtsMemphis, Tennessee Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest, First Horizon Foundation through an ArtsFirst grant, Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, Independent Bank, Evans|Petree, P.C., Campbell Clinic, the family of Pat and Ernest Kelly, The Sims Family Foundation, Nancy R. Copp, the family of Owen and Margaret Wellford Tabor, Dr. Greta McCormick Coger, the Barbara B. Apperson Angel Fund, the Dunbar Abston Fund for Sustainable Excellence, University of Memphis’ Department of Theatre & Dance, Shelby County Schools, Collierville Municipal School District, Memphis Juvenile Justice System, the Memphis V.A. Hospital, and the Benjamin Hooks Library Friends. TSC’s season is funded under a Grant Contract with the State of Tennessee.
