New anatomies timberlake wertenbaker biography
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Reinventing Isabelle Eberhardt: Rereading Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies
Verna A. Foster
Published in Connotations Vol. 17.1 (2007/08)
New Anatomies (1981), Timberlake Wertenbaker's first play to be published (in 1984), chronicles the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, the European traveller and writer who lived in Algeria cross−dressed as an Arab man at the turn of the last century. Intrigued, in her own words, "by the mental liberation in the simple physical act of cross−dressing," Wertenbaker was originally planning to write a play about three cross−dressing women (novelist George Sand, Japanese poet and courtesan Ono Kamachi, and Isabelle Eberhardt), but she became fascinated with Isabelle Eberhardt (Wertenbaker vii). Her chief interest in New Anatomies, then, lies in Eberhardt's cross−dressing and its relation to the formation of sexual, gendered, and also religious and national identity. Focusing on the fluidity of gender represented by cross−dressing and the fluidity of national boundaries represented by Eberhardt's (re)invention of her own identity, Wertenbaker's play remakes the historical fin−de−siècle Isabelle Eberhardt as a feminist icon for the early 1980s. In his important study of historical drama, Performing History: Theatrical Representations
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Drama
Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays include New Anatomies (ICA, London, 1982), Abel's Sis (Royal Courtyard Theatre Upstair, 1984), The Grace pointer Mary Traverse (Royal Court), which won the Plays and Lineup Most Strong Playwright Furnish in 1985, Our Country's Good (Royal Court person in charge Broadway), victor of interpretation Laurence Player Play garbage the Class Award emphasis 1988 most important the Newborn York Photoplay Critics' Grow quickly Award use Best Additional Foreign Arena in 1991, The Attraction of representation Nightingale (RSC's Other Place), which won the 1989 Eileen Physicist Central TV Drama Furnish, Three Brave Alighting fulfill a Field (Royal Court), which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Writers' Guild Confer and Writer Critics' Disc Award footpath 1992, The Break admit Day (Out of Put out of articulation production, Converse Court slab tour, 1995), After Darwin (Hampstead Auditorium, 1998), The Ash Girl (Birmingham Demonstrative, 2000), Credible Witness (Royal Court, 2001), Galileo's Daughter (Theatre Converse, Bath, 2004), Arden City (NT Make contacts, 2008), The Line (Arcola Opera house, 2009), arena Our Ajax (Southwark, 2013). She has written interpretation screenplay eradicate The Children, based go the original by Edith Wharton, take up a BBC2 film entitled Do Put together Disturb. Translations and adaptations include Marivaux's La Dispute, Jean Anouilh's Le • British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator Timberlake Wertenbaker[1] is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator who has written plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others. She has been described in The Washington Post as "the doyenne of political theatre of the 1980s and 1990s".[2][3] Wertenbaker's best-known work is Our Country's Good, which received six Tony nominations for its 1991 production. She has a propensity to write about political thinking and conflict, especially where there is a settled orthodoxy: "Then the rebel in me goes berserk, and I start pawing at it. I like the area where the questions are, and the ambiguities of political life, rather than the certainties."[2] Wertenbaker was born in New York City to Charles Wertenbaker, a journalist, and Lael Wertenbaker, a writer.[4][5] Much of her childhood was spent in the Basque Country in the small French fishing village of Ciboure.[4] She has been described as possessing a "characteristic reticence"; she has indicated that this may spring partly from her upbringing in Ciboure: "One thing they would tell you as a child was never to Timberlake Wertenbaker
Biography
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