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05/01/12
6:00pm
Center for Jewish History
Forchheimer Auditorium
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
In English
Reception to follow
Young author and current DAAD Chair in Contemporary Poetics at NYU Daniel Kehlmann has followed up on the worldwide success of his novels with his first play, Geister in Princeton, which had its premiere at the Salzburger Festspiele last year. Ghosts in Princeton, in a translation by Carol Brown Janeway - who translated his novels Measuring the World, Me and Kaminski and Fame for Pantheon Books - will be presented at the Center for Jewish History next week as a staged reading. This touching play tells the story of Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), who by the age of 24 had revolutionized the field of mathematics. After the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Gödel and his wife Adele immigrated to Princeton, where he joined his good friend Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study.
The reading will be presented with some minimal staging elements to give the audience an impression of the play’s concept of space and time, which is structured around Gödel’s mathematical proofs for the possibility of time travel. Gödel goes back in time - both observing and reliving significant moments in his life - but beyond the Dickensian structure he also co-exists and interacts with himself as a child.
Kehlmann will be on hand to introduce the play.
Directed by Robert Lyons. With Jack Wetherall, Emily Zacharias, Ethan Haberfield, Harry Peerce, Mike Smith Rivera, Vitus Wieser and Jonathan C. Kaplan.
Leo Baeck Institute and Goethe-Institut New York are extremely grateful to Deutsche Telekom for its support of this program. Special thanks also to Ambassador Peter Wittig and Huberta von Voss Wittig.
