Joshua Casteel
Photo Courtesy of the Artist

Join us for a reading of Joshua Casteel’s play Returns: A Meditation in Post-Trauma. A former Abu Ghraib interrogator turned conscientious objector, Casteel will join David Gothard (UK), Emily Mann (McCarter Theater Princeton), Scott Spencer (Writer), Laren McClung (NYU Veteran Writers Workshop), Drew Cameron (Combat Paper Project), Lovella Calica (Warrior Writers Project), and Jose N. Vasquez (Iraq Veterans Against the War NYC Chapter President) in a post-reading discussion on art and the experience of war. We will also host a (closed) afternoon writers workshop for veterans.

Joshua Casteel served eight years in the US Army, including seven months as an interrogator and Arabic linguist in the Iraq War. He was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector and is now an MFA candidate at the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, after receiving his MFA in Playwrighting at that institution in 2008. His plays have received staged readings at The Royal Court (UK), The Abbey Theatre (Dublin), and The McCarter Theatre (Princeton). Casteel has been featured in publications such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, National Catholic Reporter, and Harper’s Baazar, and has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, and the BBC.

David Gothard
Photo Courtesy of the Artist

David Gothard is the former artistic director of the Riverside Studios where his pioneer work with Tadeusz Kantor, Shuji Tereyama, Samuel Beckett, Bruce McLean, Gavin Bryars, and many others bridged performance and theatre with contemporary movement and the birth of Dance Umbrella. The theatre work of Riverside spread to the National Theatre Studio with Peter Gill and to Tokyo and to Broadway with David Leveaux. His roots were in the experimental Traverse Theatre Club, Edinburgh and the Royal Court Theatre. He now works between the Abbey Theatre Dublin, where he is Associate Artist, a writers’ workshop in Derry, Northern Ireland, the Kasser Theatre, Montclair, and regularly visits the Theatre Writers’ Workshop in Iowa.

6:30 p.m., Monday, March 30th, 2009
Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!