Jay Kirk's "Bartok's Monster" featured in Penn Today

Poster for "Bartok's Monster" depicting a man playing cello surrounded by sculptural crumpled paper.

 

Check out creative writing faculty member Jay Kirk in Penn Today! From the article:

When Penn Live Arts (PLA) presents “Bartok’s Monster” on Sunday, Jan. 21, it will mark a nearly unprecedented PLA artistic collaboration between categorization-defying Pig Iron Theatre Company, English Department lecturer Jay Kirk, Whitebox Theatre installation artist Sebastienne Mundheim, and Penn’s string-quartet-in-residence Daedalus Quartet. The result promises to be something special.

The production, which will be performed twice on Jan. 21 and runs approximately 70 minutes, draws inspiration from Kirk’s 2020 experimental nonfiction book, “Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements.” A complicated work that lives up to its “New Nonfiction” subtitle, it engages with themes of grief and adventure while also telling the gonzo journalism story of an attempt to track down the original music manuscript of “String Quartet No. 3” by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who debuted the piece in Philadelphia in 1928.

Read the full story at the link below.