Sylvan Oswald

Sylvan Oswald

Playwright

Bio

 Duke Libraries Rosati Fellow Sylvan Oswald is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Philadelphia who creates plays, texts, publications, and video. His work uses metatheatricality and formal irreverance to explore the ways we construct our individual and national identities. His text Trainers was recently developed at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep and his artist’s book High Winds, co-created with graphic designer Jessica Fleiscmann, was published in 2017 by X Artists’ Books and adapted into a performance at Abrons Arts Center and the LAX Festival produced by Los Angeles Performance Practice. Sylvan’s lo-fi semi-improvised web series Outtakes starring Becca Blackwell and Zuzanna Szadkowski is hosted at weareopentv.com. His plays and collaborations include A Kind of Weather (Playwrights Horizons/Clubbed Thumb Superlab), Sun Ra (Joe’s Pub, Jerome Travel and Study Grant, Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab), Profanity (Undermain Theater, Dallas; Six Points Fellowship, Soho Rep Dorothy Strelsin Fellowship), Nightlands (New Georges, Full Stage Commission from New Dramatists), Pony (About Face Theater, Chicago), and Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb). Additionally he has developed his work with Center Theatre Group, Playwrights Horizons, The Foundry Theatre, Hangar Theatre, McCarter Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Portland Center Stage, and Page 73 Production’s I73 Writing Group. Sylvan is the recipient of the Thom Thomas Award for Playwriting from the Dramatists’ Guild Fund, a Hellman Fellowship from UCLA, the Dorothy Strelsin Playwriting Fellwoship from Soho Rep, a Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, a Thurber House Playwriting Fellowship from The Ohio State University, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists as well as residencies with The Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and The Millay Colony for the Arts. Sylvan created Play A Journal of Plays with Jordan Harrison and has had his writing published in Imagined Theatres (Routledge), Audience (R)Evolution (TCG), Osmos, The Best American Non-Required Reading 2014, PAJ, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is an assistant professor of playwriting at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television, an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb and an alum of New Dramatists. 

Engagement Information

Winner of the 2017-2018 Rosati Visiting Writer Fellowship from Duke Libraries,  Sylvan Oswald will be using archival materials at Duke to explore the world of his new performance text, Trainers, or the brutal unpleasant atmosphere of this most disagreeable season. Trainers is a theatrical essay about falling off a horse and a tale of infatuation among a group of depressed revolutionaries living through a future civil war. Performed as a lecture by the author, Trainers is based on an essay by Montaigne and the story of his intellectual love affair with political thinker Etienne de la Boetie. Trainers moves meta-theatrically through time and identities while exploring questions of personal and political responsibility - it is intentionally fuzzy whether the speaker is with us in the present day, speaking as himself, speaking as Montaigne, or telling a fictional story. 
 
Oswald will teach a masterclass in playwriting to the students of Neal Bell's playwriting class on March 26, and present a performance of Trainers on March 28 at 7:00p in the Ruby Lounge.

Activity

Open masterclass March 26 - Play From the Wreckage: Finding A Play With Found Text - Using found materials can help writers get outside their usual thought patterns to solutions that might surprise them and unlock new ideas. In this workshop-style master class, students at any level of playwriting experience will learn playful techniques for using materials from our media environment to galvanize works-in-progress or to spark new ones. Letting “outside” material into a text can inject conflict, surprising language, and even new characters or settings. These strategies also offer writers a chance to metabolize and work with their responses to current events. Award-winning theater artist Sylvan Oswald will lead students through techniques he has employed in his own work. Email theater@duke.edu for details.