Arden Institute

EXAMINE. REFLECT. ANALYZE. Lead.

Theatre and Thought: The Arden Summer Experience

August 7 to 10, 2008

Truth or Consequences: The Making and Breaking of the Lie

Given our dependence on trust and our susceptibility to denial and deception in every human interaction, how can we know and speak and promote the truth? Who betrays truth, who succumbs to lies, and who finds the clarity and courage to serve the truth? How and why? Is art an illusion and the poet a liar, as Plato warns? How do artifice and artfulness—the contrivances of fictions, the cultivation of masks, role-playing, and rhetoric, the celebration of comic confusion—also serve truth, virtue, and happiness? In public governance, professional success, and private lives, when do righteous ends justify artful—or deceptive—means?

These age-old questions, and the destructive/redemptive power of the lie as "fiction" (subject of the acclaimed novel and film Atonement) find dramatic expression in four plays at Shakespeare and Company this season, Shakespeare's Othello and All's Well that Ends Well, Charles Morey's adaptation of a Feydeau farce, The Ladies Man, and Christine Whitley's new play, The Goatwoman of Corvis County. Such are the themes of our seminar, and the topic is timely: in a culture of corporate fraud, financial chicanery, scientific, literary, and journalistic dishonesty, doping scandals, corruption and cover-ups at the highest levels of political, legal, and military life, to name but a few current vices, responsible citizens and leaders are called to question treachery and seek truth, enabled by the vigilance of life and the vision of art.

Our seminar will cultivate both as we discuss the plays and other seminal texts, and as we learn from the directors, actors, and one another, each participant with dramas to recall, stories to tell, artfulness to admit to, and revelations to share—of truth or consequences.

Click here to download the enrollment form.

“The conversations were rich, rich, rich and I learned more about myself than I can describe. I return again and again to the role that autobiography plays in the construction of self, the implications for one’s future trajectory, the platform we create with our life stories, and what that means for how we relate to others. Heady stuff. It was a wondrous weekend. The combination of readings, presenters and attendees was a gifted piece of alchemy.”

– Chair of the Board, International NGO