Fall 2022 Theatre Information Session

Thank you for your interest in the Theatre MFA Program. We hope you will join us for our information session on Saturday, November 19th, 2022, from 11:30 am. It will be held on Zoom. A Theatre Directing MFA thesis production will be showing at the Lenfest Center for the Arts at 2 pm for those in the NYC area. If you are interested in attending the performance, please fill out another RSVP in your confirmation and reminder emails. Please note there is limited space for the 2 pm performance.  

Columbia University School of the Arts will present The Sea Does Not Reach Naples, a directing thesis production from current student Elena Vannoni.

The Sea Does Not Reach Naples is a play based on Anna Maria Ortese's 1953 collection Il mare non bagna Napoli, a lively representation of everyday life in post-WWII Naples, Italy. In the building of the Granili – a grotesque emblem of Naples in the 50s, the writerly persona of Ortese guides us through a child's experience of receiving her first pair of glasses, a woman's inner struggle upon the life-altering return of her lost love, and a melancholic hope to hold together a family broken by the war. Traveling with Ortese in the inferno-esque reality of post-war Neapolitan society, we experience in each story the painful grace that evokes the cuore pensante (ever-thinking heart) within ourselves.

'A Pair of Eyeglasses,' 'Family Interior,' and 'The Involuntary City' is excerpted from NEAPOLITAN CHRONICLES by Anna Maria Ortese; copyright © 1994, Adelphi Edizioni, Milan; Translation Copyright © 2018 Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, produced by arrangement with New Vessel Press.

Please fill out the form below to register for the information session.

If you have any questions, please email the Office of Admissions at soaadmissions@columbia.edu. We look forward to seeing you there.