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Laine Rettmer is an actor and opera director. Her acting work can be seen in the upcoming film Frank and Lola with Imogene Poots and on TV shows and films including Boardwalk Empire, Blue Bloods, Suits, 6 Degrees, Rescue Me, Fur, and The Disinherited. On stage, she is a frequent collaborator with the director Jay Scheib and has worked on 12 shows with him to date. Rettmer has been the resident stage director for the Brooklyn-based company LoftOpera for the past two seasons, most recently directing Lucrezia Borgia at the beginning of April. She will direct a new opera, Pedr Solis, for Guerrilla Opera Company in Boston in May and The Rape of Lucretia for LoftOpera this November.

 


Performance:

Philosophy in the Boudoir

A full reading of the book by the Marquis de Sade (1795), in the first unexpurgated English translation by Richard Seaver & Austryn Wainhouse published in the US by Grove Press in 1965. No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century–from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka–is indisputable. Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) is a major work that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy. It’s a dialogue set in a boudoir exploring and experimenting through language the links between total freedom of thought and total freedom of manners and bodies. The text is adapted for five actors who give their voice to a relentless Marquis de Sade proposing a radical thought experiment.

Explicit content.

Time: 12 am – 5 am
Location: Ukrainian Institute of America / 3rd Floor / Oval Room

 


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