Theater Department supports playwright

Sibyl Kempson described her upcoming play “Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag” in an email: "When difficult situations such as the abject conditions of poverty are articulated to the wider public in a mode of high art, aesthetics and ethics collide in a way that can erase our ethical response - depending on how poetic the reporting. The reports are moving, but too beautiful to move us to action. This piece is an irrational response to that collision and its limits, with help from the journals of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, The NEW American Machinists Handbook, and ancient Assyrian mythology, and then shoved into the strict alchemical formulae of the Broadway musical."

Sybil Kempson is an experimental playwright who has worked with Elevator Repair Service, a group that once almost came to Duke and includes a Duke alum. She is a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a member of the New Dramatists class of ‘17 and a 2013 McKnight National Resident and Commissionee. Her plays have been performed at a number of venues, from the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas to the Theater Bonn in Germany.

Kempson, who earned her MFA from Brooklyn College, is coming to the university for a residency from September 16th through September 28th to develop “Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag” through Theater Previews New Works Lab. Theater Previews New Works Lab aims to bring in playwrights and allow them to develop and nurture their pieces in a different environment. Kempson follows a long line of Theater Previews playwrights, including Milo Cruz and Jose Rivera. Her residency will involve a period of workshopping and “working in the room live, writing and rewriting,” according to Jody McAuliffe, Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies and Chair of Theater Studies. During her residency, Kempson will also meet with classes, engage students in preparation of her play and stage a two-night reading of her work-in-progress.

"We've had many male playwrights come to campus in the past and we're excited to bring in a woman playwright,” said McAuliffe. It is especially important for this work in particular, as it references the presentation of “truth”—documentary photography and maps—by men.

“Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag” is a commission for NYC Players. The play was written by Kempson using source material from James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and “Land and Life” by Karl Sauer. The title references famous critic, filmmaker and writer Susan Sontag—McAuliffe said that the play will most likely focus on “the Sontag material, geography, land, and Walker Evans.”

Walker Evans was a photographer featured in the well-known “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In “Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag,” Kempson will explore ethical issues of documentary. Sontag wrote extensively on Evans’s photographs of the Depression-era South in her collection of essays entitled “On Photography,” criticizing the exploitation of photographic subjects through manipulative documentary. The debate about what is right and wrong in documentation of sensitive subjects endures. Sontag famously likened the camera to a gun, and delved into controversial issues about the supposed truth of photography and the role of responsibility toward a subject. She critiqued the assumed moral immunity that a camera seems to give photographers; in “On Photography” she wrote, “The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed.” By bringing in issues of how people are photographed and how they are perceived by the viewer, Kempson will bring Sontag’s criticism to life in another medium.

Choreographer David Yeoman will collaborate with Kempson on dance portions of her work. Additionally, two dance students, one of whom is a dancer from the American Dance Festival held in Durham each summer, will be working with Yeoman and Kempson. They are bringing in local actor and Duke alum Carl Martin, who teaches at the Durham School of the Arts, to act in the performance. There will be several students involved in the development of Kempson’s work, including students in the Masters of Fine Arts Program and PhD in Visual Studies, as well as undergraduates. McAuliffe described the collaborators as an “interestingly mixed group of people.”

By using wide-ranging source material and bringing in many facets of art and performance, Kempson’s “Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag” will likely be a dynamic look at the morality of a variety of subjects.