Comedian and playwright, Megan Gogerty will be in Sewanee for 3 events:

 COMEDY WRITING WORKSHOP

Wednesday, March 26 at 7:30PM
Tennessee Williams Center/Studio Theatre
Learn the secrets of writing comedy from Megan Gogerty.

LECTURE:

Can Political Comedy Change Minds?
Thursday, March 27 at 4:30PM
Mcgriff Alumni Hall

In today’s political climate of inflammatory rhetoric and fake news, citizens increasingly turn to an unlikely voice of reason: the comedian. The 21st century has seen the exponential growth of late-night satirists, infotainers, and pundits, and it sometimes can be difficult to tell the jokesters from the journalists. Do comedians really speak truth to power? If they do, does power listen? Should citizens? Professor and comedy studies scholar Megan Gogerty discusses the rhetorical advantages and disadvantages comedians have when doubling as public intellectuals. 

PLAY READING:

Fair State
Thursday, March 27 at 7:30PM
Tennessee Williams Center/Studio Theatre

When comedian Megan Gogerty loses her charming, unreliable, alcoholic father, she unearths evidence of her family’s ancestral ties to the founding of the state of Iowa: are they hearty immigrants making a new life in a new state, or a collection of self-satisfied boot-strappers complicit in the destruction and erasure of Iowa’s indigenous tribes? (Why choose?) As she examines Iowa’s unsavory past, she lays bare her own immediate history and the secrets of abuse and neglect that haunt her and her sisters. What do we do with our problematic relatives? We tell the truth.

These events are made possible by the Dakin Fund, The University Lectures Committee, the Department of English & Creative Writing, the Department of Theatre & Dance, and the Department of Political Science

BIO: 

Megan Gogerty is a playwright and comedian. A recipient of the Cloris Leachman Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement, her solo show Lady Macbeth and Her Pal, Megan played the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won the Audience Pick of the Fringe at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Her play FEAST. was named as a Critic’s Pick by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Her play Bad Panda (Theatre Without Borders, Beijing; Iron Crow Theatre Co.; WordBRIDGE Boomerang Playwright honoree) is published by Original Works Publishing and was translated into Spanish for a five-month run at Foro Lucerna del Teatro Milan in Mexico City. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed her solo show Hillary Clinton Got Me Pregnant in their yearly Top Ten Best Plays. Megan’s musical drama Love Jerry premiered at Actors Express in Atlanta and was produced in the New York Musical Theatre Festival where it won three Talkin’ Broadway Citations and four NYMF Excellence Awards including Excellence in Writing (Book). Her short play Super Hot Raven and Raven II: The Ravening is published in the anthology The Best American Short Plays of 2015 by Applause Books. Other plays include: Housebroken (Riverside Theatre, Hollins University); Save Me, Dolly Parton (Riverside Theatre, Synchronicity Theatre; named among Best Plays in Atlanta by Creative Loafing). Megan was a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, a WordBRIDGE alum, and she earned her MFA in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches playwriting and comedy studies at the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and is a regularly returning visiting faculty for the Playwright's Lab at Hollins University.