Glenn Zucman

Performances of Letters:

❖ Tuesday, Dec 1, 4:30 pm, PCC Room C-257
❖ Saturday, Dec 5, 6:30 pm, PCC Center for the Art CA-135 – ticket for the 7:30 performance of Orlando required

Elizabeth Holmes used words like a fog to manipulate investors. Sylvia Plath used them like a scalpel to explore her soul. In our time we value the words of influencers more than those of poets. Yet a century from now we will still read Plath’s poetry and Holmes will be a footnote.
Is our time upside down? Why do we privilege texting “nothing, what are you doing?” over driving safely? Over being present?

A 2014 hack stole the emails of Sony Pictures Hollywood chair Amy Pascal. We dissected her emails for inconsistencies and human failings. Is reading Virginia Woolf’s letters “art”? And reading Amy Pascal’s emails “voyeurism”? Does it matter that one is a living person whose career was cut across by the email disclosures, and one deceased, and whose work belongs now to history?
We experience Kardashian tweets in real time. But the loneliness of Carson McCullers’ letters only after she has left this earth. Do Kardashian tweets ever add up to anything more? Do McCullers letters become poetry?

Tonight’s performance grew out of Trisha Herrera’s Women’s Literature workshop and Katherine Nigh’s stage production of Orlando, both at Pasadena City College. We will be reading for you a collection of letters by women authors. Authors who explore the range of human challenges through the medium of the letter.
As you experience these letters we hope you will find something of yourself in the words of these writers. And something beyond yourself.

The Letters

1. Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicholson, 1922, read by:
2. Emily Dickenson to Elizabeth Holland, 1873, read by:
3. Carson McCullers to David Diamond, 1941, read by:
4. Interlude: Vita & Virginia I, 1926
5. Jane Austen to Anna Austen, 1814, read by:
6. Iris Chang to Posterity (suicide notes), 2004, read by:
7. Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes, 1956, read by:
8. Interlude: Vita & Virginia II, 1927
9. Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, 1929, read by:
10. Eve Babitz to Joseph Heller, 1977, read by:
11. Virginia Woolf to Leonard Woolf, 1941, read by: