Fri. & Sat. July 13-14 at 8pm, Sunday July 15 at 1:30 pm
PLEASE NOTE NON-STANDARD SUNDAY PERFORMANCE TIME!
Written and performed by ILAN STAVANS
Directed by MATTHEW GLASSMAN
Lighting by SABRINA HAMILTON
After a chance meeting with a shaman in Colombia, Ilan Stavans, the highly regarded literary scholar, found himself in the Amazon rainforest. He had reluctantly agreed to participate in a religious ceremony that involved taking the hallucinogen ayahuasca. Even though he considered himself a skeptic and a rational intellectual, as someone whose worldview was defined by his education and his heritage as a Mexican Jew, Stavans found that the ritual pushed him to reconsider many of his basic understandings, including his perceptions of indigenous cultures in Latin America, as well as his career as teacher, thinker, and artist.
This one-act play is delivered in the form of a lecture that mimics the author’s startling spiritual journey.
BUZZ ON THE OVEN
"How does a mild-mannered scholar/writer/professor become a jaguar, kill and eat a deer? I got to witness Ilan Stavans’ re-immersion into what happened to him, telling and showing the audience his impulsive and, transformative journey into the dark Columbian night. He finished the performance shirtless and soaked with sweat. I drove home, filled with the knowledge that there are so many worlds in our world and “reality” is, indeed, a shifting and terrifying place. And how the theater, in the hands of a great story and good actor, can give reality a good shake."—Connie Congdon, author of Tales of the Lost Formicans
"Ilan Stavans’ wonderful The Oven is a daring reveal of his deep dive into another culture, told with humor, poignancy, and excitement. His self-effacement and emotional awareness pokes holes at academic stuffiness. He is fully in it, and brings his audience along on this spiritual journey both of the shamanic tradition he visits in Latin America and his own deep Jewish heritage."—Stacy Klein, founder and director, Double Edge Theatre
"Ilan Stavans is one of today’s most prolific shapers of Latinx letters, in his scholarly and creative work, and both are realized in this hybrid project. The Oven innovates in content and form. It offers a penetrating look behind the façade of our existence, in a non-appropriative way; Stavans is always conscious of his outsider/cosmopolitan status. It will certainly stimulate much critical and creative conversation and scholarship."—Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands and editor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture
"A compelling piece of stagecraft that documents the inner and outer workings of a mind on a narcotic trip, but it also documents the uncanny and serendipitous curiosity of a literature professor."—William A. Nericcio, editor of Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck’s Enduring Voice for California
Funded in part by the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
INDUSTRIOUS ANGELS is a solo hand-crafted-story-spinning-shadow-puppet-memory-play-with-music evoking the secret creative lives of women, mother/daughter bloodlines, and the ghost of Emily Dickinson. In a shadowed attic, crammed with curio cabinets, work tables, chests and drawers (containers for mementos and unmentionables), a daughter searches for what it is that ties together her mother, herself, and a radical, elusive poet.
A story about the crafting of stories, INDUSTRIOUS ANGELS was conceived by actor/creator Laurie McCants on a visit to Emily Dickinson’s home, where the poet wrote the almost 1800 poems that were found after her death. The story unfolds through puppetry, paper-cutting, music, movement, light and dark, and the weaving together of words. It is a dance of the hands honoring women’s handiwork: mending, preserving, ordering, adorning, writing, hiding.
This piece was developed at the Ko Festival of Performance and the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. It first premiered at the Ko Festival in 2011 and is being reworked and revived this year at Ko in conjunction with Annual Meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society which is being hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum.
An elite group of musicians, from as far afield as Vienna, gathered to record Klucevsek’s score for INDUSTRIOUS ANGELS. They include Todd Reynolds on violin, pianist and toy piano prodigy Isabel Ettenauer, and the composer on accordion. 
