On November 15, 2009, MAT candidates Mim Readling, Nicole Hartz, and Rachel Woodward braved the buzz at the Ithaca Public Education Initiative's annual Adult Spelling Bee, which took place in the gym at Ithaca High School. IPEI provides small grants for faculty and students in the Ithaca City School District. The bee emphasizes obscure words borrowed from foreign languages. Although they were eliminated after their fourth word--the Scottish dialect word "lachan," meaning a small lake--Mim, Nicole, and Rachel lasted longer than the typical team, and they left the field with honor.
Scenes from On the Verge's November 19, 2009, production of Martin McDonagh's 1996 play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, directed by Professor Claire Gleitman of the English Department.
From the director's program notes:
The Cripple of Inishmaan takes place in 1934 on the remote island of Inishmaan, one of three Aran Islands that lie off the west coast of Ireland. Inishmaan is a place so dreary, as McDonagh portrays it, that there is little to do apart from staring at cows and, occasionally, pegging them with stones. Life becomes enlivened when word arrives that Robert Flaherty, a Hollywood director, is coming to the nearby island of Inishmore to make a film about its inhabitants. Most excited by the news is Cripple Billy, an earnest young misfit whom the other islanders treat with scorn. Billy's twisted body is a physical expression of his frustration and longing; his gently poetic spirit sets him apart from the other islanders, for whom cruelty is an irrepressible instinct borne out of their unrelieved boredom and longing for sensation of any kind. The arrival of Flaherty's film crew offers Billy his one opportunity for adventure, stardom, and--most precious of all--escape.
Like many Irish plays, The Cripple is about the importance of storytelling in Irish culture. Yet McDonagh is no J. M. Synge, nor does he wish to be. The Cripple is a darkly comic send-up of more reverential representations of rural Ireland--such as The Man of Aran, the film that the historically real Robert Flaherty did indeed make about the Aran Islands--as well as the tradition of Irish drama represented most famously by Synge's Playboy of the Western World.
Cast:
Kate: Judith Levitt (faculty, Theatre Arts)
Eileen: Kathleen Mulligan (faculty, Theatre Arts)
Johnnypateenmike: Kevin Murphy (faculty, English)
Cripple Billy: Ned Donovan (student, Theatre Arts)
Bartley: Max Lorn-Krause (student, Theatre Arts)
Helen: Celeste Rose (student, Theatre Arts)
Babbybobby: Graham Drake-Maurer (student, Theatre Arts)
Doctor: Michael Twomey (faculty, English)
Mammy: Susannah Berryman (faculty, Theatre Arts)
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Scenes from On the Verge's April 23, 2009, production of J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World, directed by Claire Gleitman.
From the director's program notes:
When it premiered in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Playboy provoked riots so intense that the police had to be called in to try (with little success) to the keep the crowd in order.... A Dublin newspaper summed up the general outrage when it pronounced the play "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood."
The "playboy" for whom the play is named is a cowardly boy who is transformed into a man when he inadvertently acts out the unconscious desires of a peasant village through a dramatic act that turns out to be not quite what it seems. The act, simply described, is a rebellion against the father and, more broadly, against repressive, authoritarian control. Ireland, not yet an independent nation, had many reasons to long to strike out against tyrants... but finally lacks the courage of its dreams and banishes revolutionary promise, and also poetry, from its door.
Cast:
Christopher Mahon: Ned Donovan (student, Theatre Arts)
Old Mahon (his father, a squatter): Kevin Murphy (faculty, English)
Michael James Flaherty (a publican): Michael Twomey (faculty, English)
Margaret Flaherty (his daughter, called Pegeen Mike): Nicole Intravia (student, English)
Shawn Keogh (her cousin, a young farmer): Alex Krasser (student, Theatre Arts)
Widow Quin (about 30 years old): Paige LaRoss (student, Theatre Arts)
Philly Cullen (a small farmer): Anthony Derrick (student, English)
Jimmy Farrell (a small farmer): Sean Golan (student, Theatre Arts)
Sara Tansey (village girl): Annie Goodenbour (student, Theatre Arts)
Susan Brady (village girl): Dani Stoller (student, Theatre Arts)
Honor Blake (village girl): Alana J. Webster (student, Theatre Arts)
Tony-Award winning actor Frank Wood performs in a reading of Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive" with a cast of Ithaca College Students.
Ithaca College English majors at the Frederick Douglass Academy, New York City, in February 2006.
Why spend a semester at the Ithaca College London Center? Here is a gallery of places to visit in London and elsewhere in England.
On March 23, 2006, an audience of nearly 100 students, faculty, and administrators gathered in the college's Handwerker Gallery to hear English Department faculty read selections from books that were or still are banned in the US and elsewhere, or that have caused other kinds of controversy. The reading was part of the School of H&S's 50th anniversary celebration.
