Tennyson's 200th Birthday Celebration Feat Paul Hecht August 6, 2009

Enoch Arden
A celebration of Tennyson’s 200th Birthday
Text by Tennyson and score for piano by Richard Strauss.
Audrey St. Gil (piano) & Paul Hecht (words)

What: Enoch Arden presented by Audrey St. Gil (piano) & Paul Hecht (words)

When: August 6, 7:000pm

Where: Cornelia Street café, 29 Cornelia Street, A/C/D/B/V/F to West 4
Cost: $10

Cornelia Street café presents an evening of poetry and music in celebration of the 200th birthday of acclaimed poet Alfred Tennyson. Pianist Audrey St. Gil and actor Paul Hecht present Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” a poem published in 1864 during Lord Tennyson’s tenure as England’s Poet Laureate.

About the Poem
The hero of the poem, fisherman turned merchant sailor Enoch Arden, leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain, who is offering him work.
He finds upon his return from the sea that, after his long absence, his wife, who believed him dead, is married happily to another man, his childhood friend Philip, and has a child by him.

The story could be considered a variation on and antithesis to the Classical myth of Odysseus, who after an absence of twenty years at sea found a faithful wife who had been loyally waiting for him.

About the Artists
Audrey Saint-Gil was born in Toulouse, France, and attended the Conservatoire National de Musique de Toulouse where she was awarded several first prizes with distinction as a pianist soloist and as a vocal coach. She received as well a PhD from the University of Toulouse. Mrs Saint-Gil has worked as a pianist and vocal coach for several famous opera houses such as Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Konzerthaus in Vienna, Carnegie Hall and The Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Paul Hecht has appeared regularly at the Café as the director of the Happy Birthday Poet series. His theatre work includes Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (Tony nomination 1968),The Invention of Love, 1776, Noises Off ,and Pirandello's Henry IV (Obie award 1990). He appeared in the Stoppard/Previn Theatre piece Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and Façade (Sitwell/Walton)with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has recorded audio-books of works by Ray Bradbury, Alexander McCall Smith, and Thomas Mann. He has appeared as several unsavory characters in most of the Daytime Dramas and of course Law and Order. He appears regularly at Symphony Space (Selected Shorts) and the 92nd street Y, where he directed Edna St Vincent Millays poetry play Conversation at Midnight.He performs a program of John Donne and Shakespeare Sonnets with the early music group Parthenia, and reads to 4th and 5th grade students at PS 255 in deepest Brooklyn as part of Screen Actors Guilds Bookpals Program.

About the Café
As the economy continues to squeeze the life out of the arts, the Cornelia Street Café remains a vital source of creative energy, positive idealism and a presenter/producer of engaged performance. Informed by its extensive and remarkable history the café remains a pioneer of the arts community. We hope you will come and enjoy the Cornelia Street Café as it continues to champion the wider arts community through its eclectic summer programming.

Hailed by Mayoral proclamation as “A culinary as well as a cultural landmark” the Cornelia Street café has been presenting an enormous variety of performance for over 30 years, launching, establishing or reviving the careers of artists such as Suzanne Vega, Eve Ensler, Bill McHenry, John McNeill, Theo Bleckman, Tony Malaby, Jeremy Steig, Suheir Hammad, Hyung Ki Joo, and dozens of others. The café has given voice to neglected major international playwrights such as Liliane Atlan, Peter Barnes and Gunter Grass and has featured appearances by writers as diverse as Senator Eugene McCarthy, attorney William Kunstler, and Monty Python’s Terry Jones.
The café has a longstanding and rich spoken work series featuring Greek-American, Italian-American, Russian-American poetry and boasts a fascinating Science series, curated by Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, which has hosted the likes of neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks and Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry. Music is represented by a highly acclaimed Songwriters series, a jazz vocal series, a blues series, several avant-garde composers’ series and an internationally renowned jazz series.