Renowned American playwright, Naomi Wallace, visited the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on May 23, 2024. She met with students and faculty members and was particularly jovial when she answered the students’ questions about her work, her inspirations, and her future projects. We are all grateful to Naomi for honoring us with her visit and giving us the opportunity to meet her in person.
Naomi Wallace is one of the most important voices in contemporary theatre. She has garnered international attention, won prestigious awards, and received numerous commissions from major theatres. Her plays have been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, the Public Theater, the New York Theatre Workshop, as well as regional theaters and independent groups around the world and have been presented in renowned festivals such as the Humana Festival of New American Plays and the Festival of Avignon. Her play, One Flea Spare has been incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theater, La Comédie Francaise.
Naomi has been acknowledged as an original and provocative voice in the theatre of our time. She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for literary achievement from Yale University, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Horton Foote Award, an Obie award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award. Naomi’s plays are taught in university drama courses and theatre scholars approach them from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
Naomi’s plays, with the language they create and the images they evoke, invite the audience into their world where the past and the present engage and disengage, where identities exist in a strange combination of cruelty and tenderness, where the borderline between the personal and the political is blurred, where aesthetics and ideology merge in a powerful combination. Naomi’s plays are meant to challenge, to shake the audience out of their complacency, to trigger a more critical understanding of the social forces at work. Her plays are both outspoken and subtle, they delve into the dark recesses of humanity not with judgmental intent but with concern and care. I am grateful to Naomi for making contemporary drama richer and more fulfilling and the theatrical experience so much more empathetic.
