Influential Women of Theatre

Join playwright Anne Bertram for a talk about three influential women theatre artists: Izumo no Okuni, Aphra Behn, and Elenora Duse. Although their names may not be familiar, the work they inspired certainly is. Okuni created Kabuki theatre, which, ironically, became an all-male art form. Behn influence flowed out to writers as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Douyle and Rabidnranath Tagore. And Duse’s revolutionary approach to acting helped to mold performers like Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Dustin Hoffman.

Anne Bertram is a playwright working in Minneapolis. She was a founding artistic associate and Executive Director of Theatre Unbound, a Minneapolis/St. Paul company devoted to work by and about women. Her plays, whichg critic John Townsend praised for their “visceral sense of women’s history,” have been seen in venues from off-Off Broadway to classrooms in Fargo. “Murderess” (2011) and “The Good Fight” (2012) ranked among Theatre Unbound’s best-selling shows and have gone on to numerous productions in the US and Canada. Among her awards are a Tennessee Williams One-Act Prize and a Playwrights’ Center Jones Commission. Her current projects include “Unfrozen” a sound-walk installation created with composer George Maurer, juxtaposing Polar explorer Will Steger’s 1986 journal with texts from explorers of the heroic age.