Donald Margulies’ ‘Collected Stories’ Performing at Bethany Arts Community, March 31-April 9

When the power dynamics between an established author/professor of writing and her adulatory student become blurred, will their relationship survive the head-on collision of their personal and professional stories?

Westchester County’s premier theatre company, GoJo Clan Productions, presents Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories, a play about about creative appropriation and whether a life confided is fair grist for another’s creative muse.

With intense and often humorous sparring, GoJo Clan veterans Julia Boyes and Robin Gorn face off in thisPulitzer Prize finalist for Drama directed by Albi Gorn, presented March 31-April 9 at Bethany Arts Community in Ossining, NY.

The Story

“The conflict between the established artist and the adulatory fan who becomes a protégé, disciple, colleague and friend—and finally threatening rival—is one of those great topics…It resurfaces in Donald Margulies’s provocative new play, COLLECTED STORIES, which confronts the prominent short-story writer Ruth Steiner with her student turned confidante turned competitor Lisa Morrison. What is new here is that the women are teacher and student both in academia and in life, that they come from different social milieus, and that for her first novel, Lisa has also cannibalized Ruth’s experiences, to wit her youthful, shattering affair with the poet Delmore Schwartz. As always, Margulies is literate, intellectually stimulating, and able to create characters of both dramatic and human interest. And he sustains this interest through six scenes covering six years that only briefly leave Ruth’s cozily messy, book-infested Greenwich Village apartment. Here two worlds clash in age-old, ecumenical dueling, led up to by great mutual emotional investment, and all the more bitter for it.” —NY Magazine.

Collected Stories runs weekends March 31-April 9. Performance times are Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. at Bethany Arts Community, 40 Somerstown Road, Ossining, NY 10562.

Tickets can be purchased at https://gojoclanproductions.ticketspice.com/collected-stories

$25 adult, $20 seniors and students.

For more information: gojoclanproductions.com; https://bethanyarts.org/calendar/collected-stories/2023-03-31/

Or email thegojoclan@gmail.com