Jeanne d’Arc and Jean Anouilh
in French Theatrical Tradition
10:00 a.m., Friday, Oct. 13, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Twentieth-century French theatre is full of plays about Joan of Arc. Between 1900 and 1919, when Catholics were campaigning for her canonization as a saint, approximately 35 French plays were written about her. After she became Saint Joan in 1920, plays continued to be written, but they tended to emphasize qualities other than her virginity. Jean Anouilh’s Joan of Arc play, The Lark (L’Alouette, 1953), remains — along with Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1920) and Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine — one of the most frequently produced plays about her all over the world. Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) was a prolific playwright whose work may be said to epitomize 20th-century French boulevard theatre with an intellectual edge. Dr. Felicia Londré’s slide presentation intertwined these two topics in 20th-century French theatre: plays about Joan of Arc, including The Lark, and Anouilh’s contribution to the wealth of French dramatic literature and theatre.

Dr. Felicia Hardison Londré is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, honorary co-founder of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, and dramaturg for the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival and Kansas City Actors Theatre. She specializes in French, Russian, and American theatre history and dramatic literature and Shakespeare production history. She has published 11 books and had lecture tours in France and Hungary. In 2001 she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Teacher Award. She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in 1999.