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Traits of Asperger's Syndrome
Concerned that her son Jared may have Asperger’s Syndrome, Joyce gives him a book – Tony Attwood’s Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals – to read. Attwood, who has operated a clinical practice in Australia for those with Asperger’s since 1992, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the disorder. Below is a quick guide to Attwood’s “Australian Scale for Asperger’s Sydrome,” which aids in diagnosing the disorder. However, Attwood notes that there is no universally agreed upon set of traits. Body Awareness purposefully avoids indicating a diagnosis in either direction for Jared.
Here is a quick guide with traits of Asperger’s Syndrome.
Interview with director Anne Kauffman
Walter Bilderback: It's great to have you back at the Wilma. You've been busy since you were here last, and have been gathering great reviews for your work. You're working with Mimi Lien, who designed Becky Shaw, again on the set design: what challenges did Body Awareness pose design-wise? What does Mimi bring to the table?
Anne Kauffman: I'm THRILLED to be back at the Wilma again and so happy that Mimi is once again collaborating with me. I love working with Mimi because she and I are both interested in theatricalizing, or perhaps abstracting realism. We had a very interesting process on Body Awareness. Since the playwright tells us in the script that all three spaces exist simultaneously, Mimi and I asked ourselves "why" and "what does it mean?" We went through a couple of ideas where we threw out the directive from the playwright, and then found our way back to it. We discovered as we started to dig in that as the play progresses, the characters are like bees bringing experience and knowledge from one space, and sort of pollinating another...so as we watch them traverse and live in each location, we watch them bring work home to the kitchen, or the bedroom, and conversely what happens in the bedroom, makes its way back to
Interview with Playwright Annie Baker
by Walter Bilderback
Walter Bilderback: My experience encountering each of your plays for the first time is that nothing much is happening to relatively ordinary people, and then sometime near the end I find myself thinking “Holy Cow! Something huge has happened without me noticing it.” You’ve said that dialogue and pace are overly-stressed in a lot of new plays. Can you talk a little about this?
Annie Baker: Oh good. That’s a huge compliment, Walter. Thank you. Yes, I feel like a lot of contemporary plays are trying to compete with film and TV, which is always a terrible idea. If you try to play their game, film and TV will beat you every time. The plays I’m talking about are fast-paced, “realistic,” take place in a zillion different locations, and have a lot of big sitcom-y laughs. I think Body Awareness is representative of my transition out of that kind of writing and into something else. I do think it has some film and TV residue on it, but it’s trying to shake it off.
Blanka Zizka's Acceptance Speech for the Zelda Fichandler Award, Oct. 24, 2011
I’m extremely honored, thrilled and humbled to receive the Zelda Fichandler Award and to find myself in the company of these distinguished finalists: Richard Garner, producing artistic director and co-founder of Georgia Shakespeare in Atlanta; Joseph Haj, artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC; and D. Lynn Meyers, producing artistic director of Ensemble Theatre in Cincinnati, as well as my good friend Howard Shalwitz of Washington DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. I’m very grateful to be in their company.
In 1950, Zelda Fichandler left New York City for Washington, D.C, founded Arena Stage, and started the remarkable regional theatre movement that has grown into a myriad of voices, artistic missions and aesthetics that is exemplified in Philadelphia, the city where I have been working for over thirty years. Today, Philadelphia is experiencing an unprecedented birthing of small theaters. The artistic fermentation of new projects and the enterprising spirit of small companies – these are very exciting realities not only in Philadelphia, but across the United States. I’m curious to find out if these energies can be sustained and if there is enough support for growth, learning, and maturing, so that these companies can grow and become extraordinary at their craft and yet not lose their initial idealism, energy, originality, and need to share ideas through art.
The Politics of Memory
by Walter Bilderback
Tadeusz Słobodzianek was inspired to write Our Class after reading Jan T. Gross’ book Neighbors, which revealed to Poland and the world that, on July 10, 1941, most of the Jewish population of the small town of Jedwabne was massacred – not by the German Army that had recently invaded the area, but by some of their Polish Catholic neighbors, three days after a similar massacre occurred in nearby Radzilow. Neighbors provoked a debate in Poland that continues to this day. The Polish-Jewish journalist Konstanty Gebert writes that before Gross’ book, “There was…not even an intimation of the fact that a group of ordinary Poles might have, as soon as the Germans gave them a push and a nod, tortured, raped and murdered their Jewish neighbors – women, children, elderly; looted their houses, and then continued to live on, as if nothing had happened.” He suggests that the controversy over Jedwabne is “probably the most important debate of the post-Communist period” in the country. A memorial erected for the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre was vandalized just a week before rehearsals started for the Wilma’s production.