E. Warren Perry, Jr.

Rehearsals have begun in Chicago for Ekphrasis: Cave Walls to Soup Cans!

 

We're excited to announce that Warren's new full-length play Ekphrasis has begun rehearsals at the Sideshow Theatre Company in Chicago. The show will open on August 13, 2009 at the Viaduct Theatre (3111 N. Western Ave, Chicago, IL) and will run through September 20. Ticket information is on the Viaduct Theatre website on their upcoming schedule. Friend and fellow CUA alum Megan Smith is directing the comedy with a professional Chicago cast.

We'll update with more information as the show progresses. We're thrilled to be working with Sideshow this summer. We hope you can make it to Chicago to see the show - we know it's going to be hilarious.

From Sideshow:

The history of art spans millions of years. This fall, Sideshow Theater Company fits it into 90 minutes.

 

Join us on a slightly condensed and always irreverent journey through the history of art, on a mission to understand exactly where art comes from and our human desire to create. Who really designed the pyramids? What put that smile on the Mona Lisa's face? Why wouldn't Whistler let his mother pose nude? Nopiece of artwork is sacred as Sideshow explores the conversations between artist, subject and self from cave men sketching on the walls in France to Warhol confronting his can of Tomato Soup.  Get the story (some fact and some fiction) on some of the world’s most iconic images, delivered by the company of magicians, freaks andgeeks that brought you the critically acclaimed Dante Dies!! (and then thingsget weird) and Everything Freezes: another winter's tale.

"This is not the truth - it is only the story." 

Swift to My Wounded: Walt Whitman and the Civil War, written and adapted by E. Warren Perry, Jr.

In honor of Walt Whitman's 190th birthday, on May 31, 2009, please view the opening scene of "Swift to My Wounded: Walt Whitman and the Civil War," presented on March 5, 2007 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. This scene is a preamble to Whitman's testimony of his experiences during the war. The entire show runs approximately one hour and twenty minutes; this scene is approximately seven minutes long. The publication of "Swift to My Wounded" will go on sale soon in the bookstore at the National Portrait Gallery.

If you are having difficulty viewing the video above, click this link to download the video: Swift to My Wounded short clip

Gallery Talk on Eudora Welty by Warren Perry, Thursday, April 30

Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 6 pm at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Writer/Researcher Warren Perry will give a talk on the 1988 portrait of author Eudora Welty by Mississippi artist

Mildred Nungester Wolfe. Welty and Wolfe, both natives of Jackson, Mississippi, had known each other for many years.

 

Wolfe wrote about painting the portrait: "In 1988, I asked her if I could come and make a drawing of her in her house. It was very cold that day. The heat was off in her house, and she was sitting in her chair in the living room with her coat on. I didn’t take my coat off either. I very carefully made a full-scale drawing in charcoal, took a photograph, and made some color notes. I used all this information to start on the canvas in the studio so Eudora would not have to sit for the portrait. When I was satisfied, I had her come and look. She liked it."

 

Among Welty's best-known works are The Ponder Heart, which earned her the American Academy of Arts and Letters' prestigious William Dean Howells Medal in 1955, and The Optimist's Daughter, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

 

Listen to the audio of this gallery talk: http://www.npg.si.edu/audio/blog_perry_eudora_welty_043009.MP3

Face to Face Gallery Talks are conducted from 6 pm - 6:30 pm on Thursday evenings. Visitors will meet in the F Street lobby of the National Portrait Gallery, 9th Street NW between F and G Streets, NW, and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

 

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Eudora Alice Welty, 1988, oil on canvas, by Mildred Nungester Wolfe.

Wolfe quotation: Mildred Nungester Wolfe, by Elizabeth Wolfe, Ellen Douglas, Mildred Nungester Wolfe, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Warren Perry will give a talk on portrait of author Toni Morrison Thursday April 2

Thursday, April 2, 6:00 p.m. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

9th Street NW between F and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC

NPG Researcher Warren Perry will give a gallery lecture on the portrait of African American author Toni Morrison by artist Robert McCurdy. Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, has been recognized for her outstanding novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988). 

For more on Toni Morrison, go to the National Portrait Gallery blog at http://face2face.si.edu/my_weblog/2009/02/toni-morrison-author-among-authors.html.

Image: Installation of Toni Morrison by Robert McCurdy, 2006, Oil on canvas,  National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; on loan from Ian and Annette Cumming

Each week, a staff member of the National Portrait Gallery or a special guest speaker brings visitors face-to-face with a portrait by offering an insight into one person. Visitors meet the presenter in the F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

Talent-Free Bird, a new short play, to be presented by Journeymen Theater Ensemble, Washington DC

February 23 - Warren's newest short play, Talent- Free Bird,  will be presented by Journeymen Theater Ensemble  as part of Chekhov's Shorts, an evening of readings and adaptations of the short stories of Anton Chekhov, directed and performed by Journeymen's Artistic Associates. 

Talent-Free Bird features Jenny Donovan, Matt Dewberry, Matt "Slice" Hicks, and Daniel Vito Siefring, and is directed by David Binet.

Monday, February 23, 7:30 - 10:30 pm

Church Street Theatre, 1742 Church Street, NW, Washington, DC (admission is pay what you can)