Location: UCF Art Gallery
Please join us at the UCF Art Gallery for a Presentation and Talk:
Shame the Devil!
Theatre Performance of One Woman Show Based on the Life of Fanny Kemble
Performed by Megan Burnett
Produced/Directed by Be Boyd and John Shafer – Associate Professors of Theatre
Wednesday, March 23 at 10:00 am
The Performance of Shame the Devil! is scheduled at UCF Theatre Black Box
Tuesday, March 22 at 7:00 pm
Doors will open at 6:30 – Admission is Free
Shame the Devil!
An Audience with Fanny Kemble uses the one-person show format, a play form that Kemble herself undertook in the 1850s, to explore the life, theatrical work, and literary endeavors of this idiosyncratic and passionate Englishwoman. A member of the leading family of Shakespearean roles in early 19th century England, Kemble came to this country to tour and left the stage to marry Pierce Butler. Subsequently discovering his family had large plantation holdings, Kemble found herself living on her husband’s plantation – and face to face with the daily workings of the slave system. Her Journal of a Residence on a Southern Plantation was embraced by the early anti-slavery movement. This script, taking Kemble’s journal as inspiration, offers a complex glimpse of all these facets of Fanny Kemble’s life, providing the performer with an opportunity to become English and American characters, men and women, slave and free, and to embody Shakespeare’s greatest creations.
Professional Bio for Megan Burnett
Most recently Professor Burnett published, produced and directed the play Alice Lloyd College: A Light Unto the Mountains. This was a devised script based on oral archives at ALC. National premiere in Washington, D.C. in 2013. Performances of the play: Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina.
Professor Burnett was an English Speaking Union Teacher Scholar at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London in 2004. She served as a Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund participant 2005, studying Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku as well as Japanese education practices in Tokyo and Hiroshima. Megan co-founded a theatre training school for adults: StageLab: Ongoing Training for Theatre Artists, and she was a co-founder and board member of The Pleiades Theatre Company. Burnett received the Alice Lloyd College Campus Leadership and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012. She is a 2014 recipient of a Post-Doctoral Faculty Fellowship from the Appalachian College Association.
Currently, she is researching Mattie Griffith Browne, a Kentucky Abolitionist and Suffragist with the goal of presenting a one-woman play about her in 2016. Megan is on the Speaker’s Bureau for the Kentucky Humanities Council and has given talks about Mattie Griffith Browne, as well as the Women of the Settlement Schools of Eastern Kentucky. Megan has presented papers and panels at the Southeastern Theatre Conference, Ohio Valley History Conference: Mattie Griffith Browne, Kentucky Abolitionist, Women of the Settlement Schools of Eastern Kentucky, JFK and the Power of Speech, Kentucky Theatre Association, and the Shakespeare in Contemporary Performance Symposium at Appalachian State University: 2014 ALC’s Caudill Players: A Model for Performing Shakespeare in Appalachia.