Event Calendar
The Memory Play Festival
Celebrating its thirteenth season, Stanford Summer Theater (SST) presents The Memory Play Festival—a collaborative project of SST, Stanford Continuing Studies, and Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa). The Festival celebrates theater as the art of memory, where characters reveal that what happened in the past only matters as it is remembered now. SST began the festival in Spring quarter with a dramatic reading of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. We now continue in Summer with full productions of Harold Pinter’s Old Times and Seneca’s Oedipus, a film series, and our traditional Saturday symposium—all devoted to the endlessly fascinating and mysterious theme of memory.
Memory Film Series
This summer’s film series begins with Jacques Tourneur’s classic film noir Out of the Past (starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer). The series continues with Alfred Hitchcock’s Freud-influenced Spellbound (Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman), with its famous dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali. The third film is Alain Resnais’ classic exploration of revolutionary memory, La guerre est finie (Yves Montand, Ingrid Thulin, and Geneviève Bujold), followed by Christopher Nolan’s disturbing study of amnesia (along with murder, revenge, and self-discovery), Memento. We conclude the series with Costa-Gavras’ Music Box (Jessica Lange) focusing on the painful duty of remembering history, even when it cuts to the quick. Participants will receive a filmography describing each film. A discussion led by a Stanford faculty member or a member of the SST company will follow each screening.
Mondays, July 11 – August 8
7:00 pm
Annenberg Auditorium, Cummings Art Building
FREE; no registration is required
Free, open to public.