Manhattan Theatre Club is pleased to announce guests and dates for After Words, the popular discussion series at the Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47^th Street

After Words is part of MTC’s continuing effort to deepen and enrich the play-going experience for its audiences. Held after selected Saturday matinees at the Biltmore Theatre, this exciting series of talks with writers, cultural critics, journalists, and members of the TOP GIRLS cast and creative team provides provocative and illuminating insights into the political, cultural, and artistic contexts of the work MTC produces at the Biltmore Theatre.

Elin Diamond is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (Routledge, 1997) and Pinter’s Comic Play (Bucknell 1985), and Editor of Performance and Cultural Politics (Routledge, 1996). Elin Diamond has been publishing essays on Caryl Churchill’s plays since 1988; a chapter of Unmaking Mimesis is devoted to Churchill, and her most recent essay, published this year, is a reading of Caryl Churchill and Samuel Beckett. With Elaine Aston, Diamond is co-editing a Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  

Psychologist, professor, and novelist, Carol Gilligan was named by Time Magazine as one of 25 most influential Americans. Harvard University Press describes her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, as “the little book that started a revolution.”  Her first novel Kyra published in January 2008 was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle as “… a rare thing: an engrossing, deeply emotional, thinking person’s love story.” Her 1992 co-authored book, Meeting at the Crossroads, was a New York Times Notable book of the year. In 2002, The Birth of Pleasure was praised by the Times Literary Supplement as a “thrilling, new paradigm” and characterized by National Public Radio as the work of a psychologist who writes like a novelist.

As a member of the Harvard faculty, she held the university’s first chair in gender studies. In 1997, she received the prestigious Heinz award for her contributions to understanding the human condition.  Her most recent work includes a critically acclaimed play, coauthored with her son Jonathan and inspired by The Scarlet Letter. She has also co-authored a book with NYU law professor, David Richards, tentatively titled, Darkness Visible: loss, patriarchy, and democracy’s future, to be published by Cambridge University Press next fall. She is currently a University Professor at New York University.