Description:

Join a staged reading of Driss Ksikes’ play The Match, a contemporary re-writing of the Oedipus complex about solitude, revolution and soccer. In the play, Moussa is a disillusioned ex-trade unionist, leaving prison. His son Ali spends all of his time on the Internet. A battle of words and silence takes place, while the national soccer team plays a historic match.

The staged reading is directed by Kathryn Walsh, with playwright Driss Ksikes in attendance. A discussion with the director and playwright will follow the production.

Driss Ksikes is a Morrocan artist, playwright, novelist, journalist, and human rights advocate. He is currently a professor of media and culture at the Institut des hautes études de management (HEM) in Rabat, and directs their research center, and has published a number of plays, novels, and academic essays on Moroccan cultural life.

Kathryn Walsh is Northwestern's MFA Directing Program Mentor and an alum of the program. She is a company member and the Associate Producing Director for Two Pence Theatre Company, where she most recently directed the Chicago premiere of Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, as well as Shakespeare's Richard II, and As You Like It. Upcoming: Convent of Pleasure by Margaret Cavendish. Also in Chicago: James and the Giant Peach (Filament Theatre); Night Lights (Living Room Playmakers); breaks & bikes (Pavement Group); A Very Merry (Un)Authorized Children’s Scientology Pageant (Next Theatre); Kill the Old Torture Their Young (Steep Theatre). Kathryn has assistant directed and verse coached multiple productions at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, including Henry VIII, Feast: An Intimate Tempest and The Madness of George III. Other Chicago assisting credits include: Our Town (Lookingglass), August: Osage County, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Steppenwolf). Additional directing credits include: The Woods Hole Plays (Cotuit Center for the Arts), The Make-Out Queen (The Common Tongue at Ars Nova, New York), Island of Slaves (Orfeo Group, Boston), 4.48 Psychosis (Boston Directors’ Lab). She has trained at Shakespeare & Company with Tina Packer and Kevin Coleman, and began studying Shakespeare as an undergrad at Harvard, where she received her B.A. in English and American Literature and Language.

Ksikes' visit to Northwestern is a collaboration between MENA, the Center for the Writing Arts, the Theater Department, and the Buffett Institute’s French and the Global Humanities Working Group.