“What happens when intellect becomes disease?”
This is the question posed on Culture.com’s website, and which famed playwright Guila Kessous attempted to answer and explain to a few hundred students and community members during Monday night’s performance of her new play at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center.
Because the play was a tribute to the work of acclaimed actor John Malkovich, the film and theater star made an appearance and discussed the roles of culture, intellect and acting after the short play.
Kessous, who is completing a double Ph.D. in Ethics and Esthetics in Comparative Literature at BU under the supervision of professor Elie Wiesel, said she wrote the play to let people ask what the differences are between intelligence, intellect and wisdom.
The play opens with a modern family arguing over dinner about whether or not watching the recent tsunami news coverage is appropriate while eating. Throughout the play, issues including learning too much, reading too much and the real value of art were discussed by the characters, who often broke the reality of the play and confessed that they were just actors.
Culture.com featured many audience-interactive scenes, including a subway scene, a trivial pursuit quiz and an all-inclusive chorus of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
The well-known nursery rhyme came at the demand of one of the actors, who insisted that the play would only end when each audience member recited a memorized poem.
Malkovich said the trip to the Tsai Center was convenient, and just a taxi ride away, from his residence just outside Boston.
“I enjoyed it,” Malkovich said in an interview with The Daily Free Press. “I had read it before, but I enjoyed seeing it.”
But although, according to the program, the play asks questions that Malkovich’s work attempts to address, the actor said he is in no position to qualify that statement.
“I don’t know what my work does,” he said. “I’d be the last person to ask that.”
Kessous, who was awarded the State Diploma in Performing Arts in 2006, the highest honor in drama issued by the French Ministry of Culture, said when writing the play a year ago, she began to consider the serious issue of what “culture” actually is.
“There is a gap between theory and practice, especially in a university,” she told the Free Press. “For me, I tried to do Culture.com because I would like to show that you cannot think what you are not doing, and you cannot do what you are not thinking.”
Production Coordinator Zachary Bos, who organized everything from the play’s opening night to getting Malkovich to show up on just three weeks’ notice, said although the play addresses the properties of intellect, it is not an intellectual play. He said it is like being “smart without being a smarty.”
“The people involved with the play said, ‘Look-we’re trying to make a point. There’s good things we want to advocate for. There’s bad things we want to criticize,'” he said. “What better way to do that than single out a figure who has done something that we support, we acclaim and who we look up to?”
Bos said one of the reasons why Malkovich was an appropriate figure who is “emblematic” of modern issues is that he has not stayed “above” Hollywood or stayed aloof from it.
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