Daughter of Venus

Last updated January 09, 2020

Daughter of Venus is a play written by historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010). The drama, which was first published in 1985, debuted at New York's Theater for the New City, directed by the author's son Jeff Zinn. It was later produced at Lucille Lortel's White Barn Theater in Westport, Connecticut. That production, also directed by Jeff Zinn, was retitled Unsafe Distances and starred Dominic Chianese in the role of Lendl.

Daughter of Venus is a family drama originally set in the context of the campaign for nuclear disarmament.^[1] After the end of the Cold War, Zinn felt the play had become outdated, but his conviction that the pervasive climate of anxiety about terrorism mirrored the concerns of earlier fears of nuclear annihilation persuaded him to make the play more topical.^[2]

In December 2008 and January 2009, Suffolk University and Boston Playwrights' Theatre produced Zinn's updated version of Daughter of Venus.^[3] A Boston Globe reviewer panned the new version for "dilut[ing] the story's specificity without making it feel current," but conceded that "the play's central concerns — personal and social ethics; the balance of obligations to ourselves, our families, and our fellow citizens; the uses and abuses of political and scientific power — remain as timely as ever."^[2]

In 2010 it was produced at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) on Cape Cod directed by Jeff Zinn, WHAT's Artistic Director. On that occasion the Boston Globe's reviewer, Louise Kennedy, referencing the earlier Boston productions said, "...that production updated the action from its original 1980s setting to the present. In doing so, it made a hash of logic and chronology and also diluted the specificity of the play’s immediate concerns — the nuclear arms race and the citizens’ movement protesting it — without really strengthening its deeper theme, the complicated relationship between personal and political acts. Now, though, Zinn the younger has restored the original script (while maintaining a few of the edits that, he says, smoothed the action), and it’s remarkable how much better “Daughter of Venus’’ works in this form. In Jeff Zinn’s fluid, naturalistic staging at WHAT (on an evocatively academic-homey set by Ji-Youn Chang), the play comes across as a quick-witted and emotionally complex study of a family, and a world, in crisis." (read full review.)

Notes

↑ Playwright and actor interviews, Daughter of Venus, January 30, 2009. Retrieved 2009-12-17].
1 2 Louise Kennedy, "Zinn's 'Daughter' caught in time warp", Boston Globe , 28 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-12-17.
↑ Daughter of Venus Archived 2010-01-16 at the Wayback Machine by Howard Zinn, News and Press, Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Retrieved 2009-12-17.

Related Research Articles

Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.

Jeffrey Warren Daniels is an American actor, musician, and playwright whose career includes roles in films, stage productions, and television, for which he has won two Emmy Awards and received several Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, and Tony Award nominations.

The Cryptogram is a play by American playwright David Mamet. The play concerns the moment when childhood is lost. The story is set in 1959 on the night before a young boy is to go on a camping trip with his father. The play premiered in 1994 in London, and has since been produced Off-Broadway in 1995 and again in London in 2006.

Lydia R. Diamond is an American playwright and professor. Among her most popular plays are The Bluest Eye (2007), an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel; Stick Fly (2008); Harriet Jacobs (2011); and Smart People (2016). Her plays have received national attention and acclaim, receiving the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, an LA Weekly Theater Award, and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award.

Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and musician based in New York. He is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Music and Theatre Arts Program's dramatic writing program. Urban is also a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.

Christopher Shinn is an American playwright. His play Dying City (2006) was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Where Do We Live (2004) won the 2005 Obie Award, Playwriting.

John Shea is an American playwright. Most of his plays are set in his hometown of Somerville, an old industrial suburb of Boston which has gentrified rapidly in the early 21st century. His one-man show, "JUNKIE," produced by Argos Productions, was nominated for an Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) award.

Bruce Norris is an American actor and playwright associated with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago. His play Clybourne Park won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights. Her play Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful.

Gideon Lester is a Tony Award-winning artistic director, dramaturg, curator, and creative producer. He is currently Artistic Director for Theater and Dance at the [Fisher Center at Bard]] at Bard College and Director of Bard's undergraduate Theater & Performance Program. He has collaborated with a broad range of American and international artists including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Krystian Lupa, Peter Sellars, Anna Deavere Smith, and Neil Gaiman. In 2015 he produced Daniel Fish's production of Oklahoma! at the Fisher Center; it subsequently transferred to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2018, and opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square in 2019, where it won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. He frequently collaborates with the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, and commissioned her 2018 performance Four Quartets, based on T. S. Eliot's poems of the same name, with music by Kaija Saariaho, design based on the paintings of Brice Marden, and narration by Kathleen Chalfant. Four Quartets subsequently performed at the Barbican in London.

Katori Hall is an American activist, playwright, journalist, and actress from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's most notorious work include Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, and The Mountaintop.

Richard Dresser is an American playwright and screenwriter, whose work has been widely performed in theaters across the United States, as well as in Europe. In addition to his plays, he wrote the book for the Broadway musical Good Vibrations and the musical Johnny Baseball. Dresser has also served as a writer and producer for multiple television series, most notably The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.

David Findley Wheeler was an American theatrical director. He was the founder and artistic director of the Theater Company of Boston (TCB) from 1963 to 1975. He served as its artistic director until its closure in 1975. Actors including Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, Stockard Channing, James Woods, Blythe Danner, Larry Bryggman, John Cazale, Hector Elizondo, Spalding Gray, Paul Guilfoyle, Ralph Waite and Paul Benedict were part of the company.

Marcia Milgrom Dodge is an American director, choreographer and writer for the stage. After working in regional theatre, off-Broadway and elsewhere for thirty years, Dodge directed and choreographed her first Broadway production, a revival of Ragtime in 2009. The production received 7 Tony Award nominations including one for Dodge for Best Director of a Musical. Her Kennedy Center production of Ragtime received four 2010 Helen Hayes Awards including one for her for Best Director, Resident Musical.

Rob Urbinati is a freelance playwright, screenwriter, book author and theater director based in New York City. He is also director of new play development at Queens Theatre.

Jeff Zinn is an American director and actor.

Pam MacKinnon is an American theatre director. She has directed for the stage Off-Broadway, on Broadway and in regional theatre. She won the Obie Award for Directing and received a Tony Award nomination, Best Director, for her work on Clybourne Park. In 2013 she received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for a revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was named Artistic Director of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California on January 23, 2018.

Company One is an award winning non-profit theatre company in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The company is known for providing adventurous, race conscious and socially aware theatre programming in Boston. Company One has produced and mounted over 50 plays.

Deborah Salem Smith is an American poet and playwright. She is the playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island and is a Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellow.

Sam Gold is a theater director and actor. He has directed both musicals and plays, on Broadway and Off-Broadway. He won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for Fun Home.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[venus-1] Playwright and actor interviews, Daughter of Venus, January 30, 2009. Retrieved 2009-12-17].

[globe-2] 1 2 Louise Kennedy, "Zinn's 'Daughter' caught in time warp", Boston Globe , 28 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-12-17.

[bpt-3] Daughter of Venus Archived 2010-01-16 at the Wayback Machine by Howard Zinn, News and Press, Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Retrieved 2009-12-17.