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Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog

November 29, 2011

Circling up and nerding out

by Kate Vangeloff in 2011/2012 Season, An Iliad

There have been some very blog-worthy happenings that have yet to be blogged about this month, and I think it’s high time I chronicle these bloggable occasions with some overdue blog posts, don’t you? (blog is a very fun word btw).

So! As November draws to a close, let me tell you about the Producer’s Circle event we had waaay back on the very first day of this month.

I think we at Court can all safely say that we’ve truly been celebrating our inner nerds this month with the development and opening of An Iliad, and the Producer’s Circle event was no exception. Let me be clear that I use the term “nerd” in the most loving and positive way, being that I am definitely one myself. I invited myself to this event not only for some blog-material and dinner, but also because I thought the whole concept for the evening was pretty cool. Basically we got to see rare editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey that are housed in the Special Collections Research Center in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library and learn about the evolution of the material and its seemingly endless translations (my favorite being the 18th century french translation by Madame Dacier.You go girl.)

The evening wrapped up with a fascinating talk by Classics professor David Wray about the first couple of pages of text in the Alexander Pope translation and a conceptual overview of our production of AN Iliad by Artistic Director Charlie Newell.

I’m not even going to try and recreate what was said because I’m just not that smart (although I have to say I was proud of myself for asking Prof David Wray if ancient Greek was a tonal language like modern Korean, which I felt was quite the erudite question. (As it turns out, ancient Greek was indeed tonal.)), but I did take lots of pictures—so enjoy!