HWS Theatre Premieres #TheBallantineDays
The HWS Theatre 2018-19 season continues with #TheBallantineDays, an original play directed by Associate Professor of Theatre Heather May and written in collaboration with HWS students.
The play takes place on the soundstage and associated rooms of a fictional 1970's sit-com, "The Ballantine Days," and its contemporary reboot of the same name, which are set on a small private liberal arts campus in upstate New York.
The premiere will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 28 in the McDonald Theatre at the Gearan Center for the Performing Arts. Additional performances will begin in the McDonald Theatre on Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, at 7:30 p.m. A Saturday matinee will begin at 2 p.m.
Tickets can be purchased for $5 at the Gearan Center office, Monday through Friday from 3 to 5 p.m. A limited number of free rush tickets will be available for HWS students with ID at the box office one hour before each performance.
#TheBallantineDays cast features: Emily Briggs '21, Gianna DeVita '21, Sal Fabio '22, Sarim Karim '22, Isabel Ingram '19, Buildings and Grounds staff member Kevin Johnson, Dominique Marshall '22, Claudia O'Connell '21, Maria Perez '22, Thomas Perry '19 and Grace Ruble '21.
Prior to the Friday performance, a Frame/Works talk with Karen Frost-Arnold, associate professor of philosophy and chair of the Colleges' Women's Studies program, will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Williams Hall, Room 201.
Frame/Works is a program designed to draw connections between scholarly examination and artistic practice. Scholars are invited to present their research on a play, playwright, historical moment, genre or style in a pre-show lecture prior to a performance. Following the performance, audience members are invited to participate in a post-show talkback with members of the cast and creative team. Taken together, the pre-show lecture and the post-show talkback, "frame" a "work" of theatrical art.
In Frost-Arnold's talk, "Bias and Exploitation in Online Content Moderation," she will explore presumptions and mistreatment of those who "decide whether your social media posts violate the platform's terms of service."
"The work of content moderators dramatically shapes our online lives: it determines what we see in our social media worlds and who gets to participate in online conversations," says Frost-Arnold. "As an epistemologist (someone who studies knowledge and how it is produced and disseminated), I am interested in how online content moderation can be biased, causing the voices of marginalized people to be silenced."