LUDWIG
AND BERTIE
A COMEDY OF IDEAS
ABOUT
THE PLAYWRIGHT
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Douglas Lackey in China |
Playwright Douglas Lackey has two lives, as a playwright and a philosophy professor. He is a Professor of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY, where he has taught since 1972. But he has a 16 year relationship with Theater for the New City, which has presented all his plays to-date.
His first play presented there, "Kaddish in East Jerusalem" (2003), dealt with issues of the Second Intifada.
His "Daylight Precision" (2014) was a historical drama examining "just war" theories through an unsung hero of World War II, Gen. Haywood Hansell.
Last season, his "Arendt-Heidegger: A Love Story" (2018) earned critical praise and drew sellout audiences. It dramatized the unlikely romance between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. In the 1920’s, they had a passionate affair. In the 1930’s, Heidegger became an ardent Nazi while Arendt became an ardent Zionist. After the war, they continued to correspond and meet in one of the more puzzling relationships of twentieth century intellectual history.
Lackey has also written an unproduced play, "A Garroting in Toulouse" (2016), set in the Thirty Years War, which dramatizes the differences, still with us, between the Protestant sense of sin and the Catholic sense of redemption.
He writes, "I am grateful to
Crystal Field and Theater for the New City for encouraging me to present
the story of Wittgenstein and Russell and their astonishing relationship.
TNC is willing to take on my “comedies of ideas” and these
are quite different from the contemporary obsession with those of jumbled
identities and failed relationships. Kudos to a theater that will buck
the mainstream."
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