On Monday 4 April at 9 PM, the Sala Aurelia at the American Academy’s Villa Aurelia will be transformed into a theater space and will resonate with the sights and sounds of the Caribbean, as Nobel Laureate and William B. Hart Poet-in-Residence Derek Walcott leads a cast including actors Wendell Manwarren, Giovanna Bozzolo and Dean Atta in the world premiere reading of his new play Moon-Child (Ti Jean in Concert).
Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia (West Indies) and has lived there for most of his life, with frequent travel and teaching abroad, including in the United States (where he taught at Boston University until 2007). In addition to being the author of sixteen books of poetry, Walcott is also a theater director and playwright, and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 1981. He has written many plays, and also wrote the lyrics for Paul Simon’s musical The Cape Man.
Walcott’s new work revisits his 1958 play Ti-Jean and His Brothers, first presented at the Little Carib Theatre in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Moon-Child (Ti Jean in Concert) features a sound-score by composer Ronald Hinkson and projected images of artwork by Derek Walcott (an accomplished watercolorist and oil painter) and by his son Peter Walcott, also an artist. The play will be performed in English; however passages from a new Italian translation by Matteo Campagnoli will be projected during the reading.
Written in rhymed verse, Moon-Child is a lyric parable, telling a story as old as that of every fairy tale that begins with three brothers who leave home to seek their fortune. In this case, however, it is the notion of home itself that is threatened, as the natural paradise of the island of St. Lucia, once blighted by colonialism and its legacy, is threatened by “a second slavery” in the form of real estate land-grabs for touristic exploitation.
Walcott’s deep love of the natural features of his native island—the cocoa-pods, the blue kingfisher, the burning flowers of the immortelle, the mountains called Pitons—is woven up with Caribbean myth and ritual to make a verse drama of visionary intensity, one including the figure of the Planter as Satan in a Miltonic drama (“paradise was lost”).
Derek Walcott has dedicated much of his creative life to making a place for poets in the contemporary theater, and the fusion of image, music and text offered by his own verse plays provides audiences with an unforgettable experience.
The American Academy in Rome is proud to be hosting the first public reading of this new play. The event is made possible by the Maria Cox and New Initiatives for Don Fund.
