Poets & Writers Theater

Vita & Virginia is a film adaptation of Eileen Atkins’s 1992 play of the same name, based on love letters Virginia Woolf exchanged over the course of a decade-long affair with Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration behind Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography. Directed by Chanya Button, the biopic stars Gemma Arterton as West, Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini as Baroness Sackville.

“The White Card is a play I wanted to write because it seemed to me that people had a difficult time talking about race. And I thought, ‘What would it look like?’” In this ArtsEmerson video, Claudia Rankine talks about the inspiration for her debut play, The White Card: A Play (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Claudia Rankine talks about how touring for her award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014) organically led to the development of her new play, The White Card. The play unfolds as an influential white couple invites an up-and-coming black artist over to their posh New York City loft for a dinner party. The world premiere is directed by Diane Paulus and produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, contestants gather to yell “Stella!” in tribute to Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire for their annual “shouting contest.”