STATION ELEVEN

The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company is a touring professional company based in West Michigan. The company was founded in 1998 by Chicago area actor and director Frank Farrell, and a cast of actors from the West Michigan area. While the company started as a summer-only production company, it now produces 5 plays a year which tour to multiple venues within Michigan, and occasionally out of state. Pigeon Creek’s actors have a high level of training in using Shakespeare’s language, and a reputation for making the plays lively, accessible, and understandable.
In partnership with the Michigan Humanities Council’s Great Michigan Read program, the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company will offer a program of scenes from multiple Shakespeare plays designed to tie in with Station Eleven, the 2015-2016 Great Michigan Read. Emily St. John Mandel’s novel features a touring Shakespeare company that travels through Michigan after a global flu epidemic, bringing art and culture into the lives of small communities of survivors. Like the companies of Shakespeare’s own time period, this troupe of actors does not rely on modern technology to create its performances. Rather it engages the imagination of its audiences, demonstrating the ways in which the arts allow people to retain their humanity and dignity in trying circumstances. Pigeon Creek’s program includes scenes from King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, and several other plays in a lively and audience-interactive performance.

Interview by Dr. J. Caitlin Finlayson

Dr. J. Caitlin Finlayson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Michigan-Dearborn, specializing in Shakespeare Adaptation and Renaissance Drama and Pageantry. Her approach to Shakespeare is interdisciplinary with a keen interest in the transposition of Shakespeare’s plays from stage to film, graphic novels, television commercials, and popular digital media. Her current research project focuses on the adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays in to graphic novels/comic books. Finlayson currently holds a three-month fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., where she is researching the illustrated history of Shakespeare’s plays. Finlayson’s interdisciplinary research in Shakespearean adaptation directly informs her teaching of courses such Shakespeare on Page, Stage and Screen, Adaptations of Literary Texts, and Shakespeare on Film.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award. A previous novel, The Singer's Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

For more, visit the author's website.

Ask Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, your questions.

Bring a copy of your book, or purchase a book at the event, to be signed by the author.

Light refreshments will be served