Cutting Timber

Woodcutters Salon

Cutting Timber:
A collective conversation examining
individual agency within institutional frameworks

Join creative team members behind the performance adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters—Associate Professor Sara Brown, Director Shira Milikowsky, and Dramaturg Lauren K. Wolfe—for a discussion of the performance’s themes.

Salon participants will reflect on their own experiences with status, norms, and tacit assumptions through the lens of the performance and share examples of artists, thinkers, and activists who’ve used their expertise to shape the world around them.

All are welcome to join this gathering whether they have or have not seen a Woodcutters performance.

Sunday, September 13 at 4:30pm
following Woodcutters performance at 2:30pm

Building W97 Theater at MIT

Free and open to the public

Get tickets to Woodcutters performances here.

Woodcutters Synopsis

Vienna, circa 1984.

A writer returns from self-imposed exile only to learn of the death of an old friend whose funeral reunites a clique of aging avant-garde artists. At the “artistic dinner” following the funeral, the writer lurks at the perimeter of the room, taking stock of the vulgarity, pomposity, and hypocrisy of the people in whom he had once invested his youthful desire and ambition. Laden with both grief and guilt, the writer condemns the culture industry to which his friend was sacrificed, implicating not only himself but everyone else in her death. Bernhard’s text prompts us to ask: What happens to artistic commitments wrongly cultivated? Who suffers as a result? And what can one do with the bitter insights resulting from compromise and complicity with corrupted collective frameworks?