Penn Art & Culture Interview with Dr. James Schlatter

Monday, November 23, 2015

Penn Provost's  Art & Culture
Interview with Project Director
Dr. James F. Schlatter


Interview by Kathy Vinogradoff for Art & Culture 

KV:
Tell me a little about Bury the Dead.

 

JS: I’ve known about the play for a long time and always thought about doing it. The play deals with a battlefield that has become a gravesite where American soldiers are being buried during the middle of this unnamed war. Just as the soldiers are about to be buried, they stand up and refuse to. So the central question is how they can get these soldiers to lie down and be buried. If they don’t lie down, they’ll stink, and the smell of war will permeate the world, bringing everything to a cataclysmic end. So they try to work out ways to get these young men to lie down and be buried. 

They come to the decision later on in the play that the only way to get the men to lie down is for a woman to talk to each soldier into lying down. A wife comes to talk to a husband, a sister comes to talk to a brother, a girlfriend comes to talk to her fiancé, and so forth. But it doesn’t work.... 

Continue to  the full interview with photos here.
 
For more photos, visit the Art & Culture Flickr set here.