Libraries' Lecture Features Local Playwrights In Panel Discussion on April 10

March 27, 2008

AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas Libraries and the Fine Arts Library announce the third annual David O. Nilsson Lecture in Contemporary Drama featuring a panel of notable Austin playwrights to discuss their influences and the current state and potential future of their art on both a local and broad scale.

The panel discussion, which begins at 6:30 p.m. on April 10 at the Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 Manor Road), will be moderated by artist, director, actor and Austin Chronicle Arts Editor Robert Faires. A reception precedes the event beginning at 5:30 p.m.

Notable authors George Brant, Kirk Lynn, Steve Moore and Sherry Kramer will address their position as straddlers—young, critically acclaimed playwrights whose early successes in the 20th century influenced the theater's trajectory into the 21st.

The featured playwrights all have a connection to Austin. Brant is in the final year of a fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, and his most recent play "Elephant's Graveyard" was chosen as one of the 10 best by the Austin Chronicle. Lynn is the founder of the Rude Mechanicals theatre collective. His play "The Method Gun" opens at the new Long Center for Performing Arts in April. Kramer is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and New York Drama League award recipient for "What a Man Weighs" in residence at the Michener Center. Moore is a Chicago native and University of Texas at Austin Master of Fine Arts graduate whose acclaimed works include "Not Clown" and the Austin-set play "Nightswim" about a meeting between Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb.

The David O. Nilsson Lecture was founded through the generosity of Dr. David O. Nilsson, a retired mathematics instructor at The University of Texas at Austin, independent scholar and Henrik Ibsen aficionado.

Past lectures have featured the Swedish novelist Lars Gustaffson (speaking on paradox in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck") and director of Shakespeare at Winedale James Loehlin (on Stanislavski's contrarian production of "The Cherry Orchard").

For more information, contact: Travis Willmann, University of Texas Libraries, 512 495 4644.