PRODUCTIONS
Current/Recent Creative Work
CURRENT PRODUCTION:
FLOWERS OF HAWAI'I
BY LEE CATALUNA
A Kennedy Theatre/UHM Theatre and Dance production
Auditions in August 2020. Streaming November 20-22, 2020
FRI/SAT at 7:30pm
SUN at 2:00pm
What are the things we share, and what are the things we keep under lock and key? In Lee Cataluna’s Flowers of Hawaiʻi, meet the quirky, troubled, and resilient members of a multi-generational local family as they battle over love, sex, money, and inheritance. Cataluna—award-winning Hawaiʻi playwright, novelist, and journalist—blends humor with sadness, mixes passion with vitriol, to create a vibrant play that is as varied as the flowers of our island. Flowers of Hawaiʻi, to be streamed live with a cast of 15 performers, is the first UHM production of a Cataluna play.
RECENT PRODUCTIONS
Indecent by Paula Vogel (OHPN/ARTS at Marks Garage, 2019)
June is the First Fall by Yilong Liu (Kumu Kahua Theatre, 2018)
The Spitfire Grill (Kennedy Theatre, 2017)
PUBLICATIONS
"'Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play': Mary Church Terrell’s Bicentennial Activism"
Theatre History Studies 27 (2018)
BOOK IN PROGRESS
AFRICAN AMERICAN PROTEST PAGEANTS: DU BOIS, TERRELL, AND THE DRAMA OF THE 1932 GEORGE WASHINGTON BICENTENNIAL
The pageants and plays written for George Washington’s 1932 Bicentennial exist on a stylistic continuum from allegory to history. While white-authored plays represent African Americans on the periphery, pageant plays by activists Mary Church Terrell and W.E.B. Du Bois place them center-stage and ask us to revise our view of Washington.
THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF CATHERINE THE GREAT: THEATRE AND POLITICS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA
The first in-depth study of Catherine the Great's plays and opera libretti, this book provides analysis and critical interpretation of the dramatic works by this eighteenth-century Russian Empress. These works are shown to be remarkable for their diversity, frank satire, topical subject matter, and stylistic innovations. O'Malley reveals comparisons to and influences from European traditions, including Shakespeare and Molière, and sets Catherine in the larger field of Russian literature in the period, further illuminating her relationship to the aesthetic debates of the period. The study investigates how Catherine expressed her social ideas throughout her drama and exploited the stage's power to promote political ideals and ideology. O'Malley sets close textual analysis within an historical framework, analyzing the major plays according to content, style, themes, characters, and relation to Catherine's life and political aims.Now Available in Paperback
TWO COMEDIES BY CATHERINE THE GREAT, EMPRESS OF RUSSIA: OH, THESE TIMES! AND THE SIBERIAN SHAMAN
Catherine the Great (1729-1796) wrote over two dozen plays and operettas, but not until this edition has a complete translation of any of them been available to an English- speaking readership.
Oh, These Times (1772) is a satirical attack on many vices Catherine wished to root out from her society: religious hypocrisy, superstition and slander. The main character, Mrs. Pious, is a superficially religious old woman who resembles Moliere's Tartuffe.
Catherine again sets her sights on superstition in The Siberian Shaman (1786), this time by satirizing shamanism as a deceitful profession which preys on the gullible. This play was part of a group of three plays usually known as Catherine's "anti-masonic" trilogy, written as a warning against the growing influence of the freemasons.
In a comprehensive introduction, Lurana Donnels O'Malley relates the plays to Catherine's status and philosophy. Purchase