English Professor Shares African Insights at Bleasby Colloquium
Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009
Dr. Andrew Ade, Westminster College associate professor of English, will present "Stage 2: Dramatizing a Dual Vision of Africa" at the Bleasby Colloquium Thursday, Nov. 19, at 7 p.m. in the Sebastian Mueller Theater of the McKelvey Campus Center. The program is free and open to the public.
Ade's presentation will identify the origins and discuss the writing experiences that resulted in two one-act plays he has written on modern African life. He will explain how he created the award-winning A Question of Taste only to discover he needed to write a companion play to transform the pair into a two-tale evening of theatre.
A Question of Taste deals with an entirely male story of African political strife. The play first appeared at the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company's 2007 Theater Festival in Black & White, where it won four awards, including Best Play, and recently won the 2009 Arts & Letters Prize in Drama.
The new play, Last But Not Least, centers on the women's experience of coping with the health crisis and the growing microfinance enterprise. This follow-up play had a successful reading at the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company last month.
"Part of my new play stems from my research on the [health and microfinance] subjects, while other parts come from my personal experiences living and working in Zaire (today's Democratic Republic of Congo) as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher," Ade said. "The goal of the entire project is to form a stereoscopic stage picture of the critical issues confronting Africa today."
Ade, who joined the Westminster faculty in 2003, earned an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and master's and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
This colloquium is part of the George Bleasby Colloquia, a series of literary events in honor of the late Dr. Bleasby, who chaired the Department of English at Westminster from 1954-75.
Contact Ade at (724) 946-7349 or e-mail adeaw@westminster.edu for more information.
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