Film, Feast, and Forum: Nathan the Wise, with Paul D'Andrea, AB '60 PhD '66

The evening will begin with an open bar and a feast specially prepared for the occasion by Chef Chris, featuring regional cuisine. The film and discussion will follow.

$35 members and guests
$60 nonmembers

Please join us for an exciting evening with Paul D'Andrea, AB '60 PhD '66,  as we screen and discuss the film based on his Charles-MacArthur-Award-nominated adaptation of Nathan the Wise. 

Nathan the Wise is a Western classic on religious tolerance. It offers a vision of Jews, Christians, and Muslims as People of the Book, united by a shared and reverenced text, mutually respectful, giving one another rich gifts of particularity. In Jersalem in 1192, at the time of the Third Crusade, the Muslim sultan Saladin declares a truce in which Muslim, Christian, and Jew are to live in harmony. The fragile peace is broken by a fiery young Templar and further threatened by Saladin's sister, the lady Sittah, and Heraklios, the Christian patriarch. Nathan is a wise and wealthy Jewish merchant whose wealth is sought by Sittah and Heraklios. The Christian Templar rescues Nathan's precocious daughter, Recha, from a fire. The two young people, Jew and Christian, are drawn to each other in love, a love which is fostered by Recha's nurse, Daya. Aided by a ubiquitous friar and a picaresque dervish, the two young people come up with an imaginative resolution to the issue of which is the one true faith, during the trial at which Nathan must defend his life.

Approximate running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

 THE FEAST

  • Greek Salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing (feta cheese on the side)
  • Chicken Shish Kebabs on a bed of roasted tomatoes, onions, and peppers
  • Potato-Crusted Snapper
  • Mediterranean Flatbread
  • Couscous
  • Roasted Vegetables
  • Baklava and Rugelach
  • Fresh Fruit

BIOGRAPHY

Paul D'Andrea graduated Harvard Phi Beta Kappa in physics, studied philosophy at Oxford and earned a Ph.D. in Shakespeare studies from Harvard. He has written plays about Einstein, Saladin, Lorenzo de' Medici, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes. Bully, winner of the CBS/Foundation of the Dramatists Guild prize, portrays an actual American community that voted to murder its local bully preemptively. The Trouble With Europe, a comic fantasia on political violence, was produced at the Mark Taper Forum Theater in Los Angeles and was chosen as best play by the American Theater Critics Association. His plays have been produced at the Berkshire Theater Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Phoenix in New York, the Magic in San Francisco, PBS, in London and in Rome. He founded Theater of the First Amendment, recipient of 11 Helen Hayes Awards, and has received Fulbright, Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships as well as the Humana Festival prize at ATL. Nathan the Wise was nominated for the Charles MacArthur Helen Hayes Outstanding New Play award. D'Andrea has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists, Wisdom Bridge, Montalvo, Playwrights Center, Playlabs and Sundance. His interests center on the civilizing power of the arts.

 

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