Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop for:

David Delbar

PhD Student, Classics and Comparative Literature

Who will present a reading of act one of:

THE SACRED BAND: A THEBAN PLAY IN THREE ACTS

Respondent: Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies

Tuesday, February 15,
4:30–6:00 PM CST
IN-PERSON
Logan Center for the Arts – Room 028

Please register for the workshop HERE. The workshop coordinators will circulate a partial draft of the play to registrants. 

(Please do not cite or circulate the works-in-progress without the author’s explicit consent.)

We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to TAPS workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu).

ABSTRACT: The Sacred Band is an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King set in early 1980s Utah. Written in verse, it overlays the themes of the original Greek play onto the religious debates surrounding homosexuality occurring in the Mormon community during the AIDS crisis. A draft of act one will be read aloud at the workshop.

BIO: David Delbar’s research interests focus primarily on representations of masculinity and sexuality in Greek and Roman epic and tragedy. He is also interested in the intersection of gender and religion in forming communal identities. From his Comparative Literature background, he has studied the influence of classical myth on later works of literature. His MA thesis was on developing a critical pluralist approach to analyzing classical myths in modern works, including adaptation theory, intertextuality, reception theory, and thematology. In his spare time he researches representations of werewolves in all media and time periods as an amateur lycanthropologist.