Description:

The Center for the Writing Arts is honored to have Driss Ksikes as the first Visiting-Writer-in-Residence to teach the ART OF PLAYWRITING.

In this play, three sisters meet again, years after their abrupt separation from each other, at their mother’s funeral, and listen to her recorded posthumous stories. The three, a divorced human rights activist, a lesbian teacher, and the youngest, a doctor soon to be married, are telling each other intimate, violent and funny stories, in the shadow of their late mother’s coffin and under the gaze of their senile father. Meanwhile, they confront their divergent relationships with rules, life conduct, sexuality, and mainly their capacity to delve into memory to better construct their own future. This play is part of a diptych project by the author and a Moroccan feminist, on “family laws and stories.”

Driss Ksikes is professor at HEM Business School (Morocco) of media, culture and creative writing..Previously editor of TelQuel, he is since 2007 managing Director of the CESEM (HEM Business School’s research center) and editor of Economia, its main electronic review journal. Literary critic, he is playwright, novelist and essay writer, co-author of “Le métier d’intellectuel” (Presses de l’Université Citoyenne, Ed. En toutes lettres, 2014), for which he has been awarded Grand Atlas Prize in 2015. His theatre writings comprise Pas de mémoire, mémoire de pas (1998), Le saint des incertains (2000), Il (2008), 180 degrés (2010), N'enterrez pas trop vite Big Brother (2013). He was selected by National Studio Theatre in London in 2012 among six best african playwrights, and nominated in 2014 as the best francophone playwright. Culturally active, he is the co-founder of Averroes encounters in Rabat since 2009 and initiator of citizen theatrical experiences.