NEWARK, NJ — New Jersey Performing Arts Center, in collaboration with the Newark Public Library, will present Philip Roth Unbound, a weekend-long festival that will celebrate, challenge and explore the life, legacy and work of novelist and Newark native Philip Roth, on what would have been his 90th birthday weekend.
Beginning Friday, March 17, and concluding Sunday, March 19, NJPAC will host a three-day series of entertaining and engaging events, featuring more than 40 of the most prominent writers, actors, artists, journalists and public intellectuals working today. Designed to appeal to audiences of all backgrounds, whatever their level of familiarity with Roth’s work, the program will include star-studded readings, conversations, comedy, controversy and debate that will explore the significance and impact of Roth’s unique literary legacy, and use his writing as a springboard to explore the broader questions it raises about life in America today.
Program highlights include a fully-cast, dramatic reading of Roth’s national bestseller “The Plot Against America”; a preview of John Turturro and Ariel Levy’s stage adaptation of Roth’s National Book Award–winning novel “Sabbath’s Theater”; and a number of spirited public debates and discussions on censorship, appropriation, identity politics and more. Participants include actors Mary-Louise Parker, S. Epatha Merkerson, Morgan Spector, John Douglas Thompson, Turturro, Marjan Neshat, Deirdre O’Connell and Jason Kravits; novelists Ayad Akhtar, Susan Choi, Joshua Cohen, Ottessa Moshfegh and Gary Shteyngart; authors and journalists Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Lauren Michele Jackson, Levy and Claudia Roth Pierpont; playwrights Chisa Hutchinson and Richard Wesley; comedian Eddie Brill; historians Sean Wilentz and Steven Zipperstein; and more to be announced.
“Not before and not since Philip Roth — fight me! — has there been a writer who is so free at his keyboard — wild and shameless — and who has so much faith in his reader to be as smart and willing as he is,” said Brodesser-Akner, author of “Fleishman is in Trouble.” “Whenever I want to read like the writer is holding me by the lapels, I always return to Roth.”
A towering voice in American letters for more than half a century, Roth delighted, entertained and provoked readers with his complex and often controversial portraits of characters chafing against the constraints of expectation and convention. Throughout his career, Roth meticulously and relentlessly mined his childhood in Newark for the material that would fuel his fiction. Like many young artists, Roth left his family and his hometown to develop an identity and voice of his own. But again and again in his work he returned to Newark, creating indelible characters and stories as dynamic, determined and distinct as the city’s five wards.
Roth remained so devoted to Newark, in fact, that he left his entire personal library of approximately 7,000 volumes to the Newark Public Library when he died in 2018. The festival is sponsoring a citywide writing contest for Newark high school students called “Your Newark Story,” inviting young authors to write about how this city shaped them. Contest winners will read their stories at the festival.
“Newark has a rich artistic history, from jazz legends Sarah Vaughan and Wayne Shorter to poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, and so many more,” NJPAC CEO John Schreiber said. “Over the last 75 years, Philip Roth was one of the most singular and challenging voices in American fiction. And while the Newark of Roth’s youth has transformed, its essential qualities remain — innovation, creativity and grit. In presenting Philip Roth Unbound we have the opportunity to invite patrons into a unique and vibrant environment of discussion and examination, not only of a writer’s life and work, but of Newark and the nation as well.”
“From the vantage point of Roth’s 90th, I can’t think of a writer who saw our nation more clearly, whose books more vividly embody its haunted, vital, coursing energy,” Akhtar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist, said. “Reading his work is still thrilling to me, its infectious intellectual static, its sublime fusion of the personal and political, and perhaps above all, the whiplash swing and staggering beauty of the American language as it flows into us from its pages. We need him more than ever.”
For more information on all of the festival’s events and to purchase tickets, visit rothunbound.org.
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