A Collective Creation of the Théâtre de l’Aquarium (1968)
Translated from the French by Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff
Directed by Professor Brian Eugenio Herrera
In The Inheritor, a 1968 activist play about structural inequities in access to educational opportunity, surrealist imagery and experimental theatricality animate the often uncanny experience of attending an elite institute of higher education without knowledge of the unwritten rules that dictate campus culture. The play follows two students – the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor – as they prepare to sit for a high-stakes exam and reveals how their respective life experiences have prepared them very differently for the demands of university life. Unveiling higher education as a world of privilege where “there is no such thing as luck,” this wildly absurdist play features a beheaded knight, a Louvre picnic, a talking record player, and a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds. Based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (1964), the play was created by Théâtre de l’Aquarium, a student ensemble, and premiered to great acclaim in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris. Presented here in a staged reading of a new (and the first English-language) translation of the script, The Inheritor speaks forcefully to the persistence of educational inequity on campuses today.
Content advisory: The reading includes themes and discussion of classism, elitism, anxiety, and high-stakes testing.
Post-show Conversation: Sept. 24
What does The Inheritor – a heretofore untranslated 1968 activist play about elite French institutions – have to tell us about the persistence of educational inequity on U.S. campuses today? How does staging such a work with Princeton students open generative points of entry into such concerns? Join us as we explore these questions and more with translators Kate Bredeson (Reed College) and Thalia Wolff (Emerson College), Brian Eugenio Herrera (Princeton), and students involved in the Program in Theater’s staged reading of the play. McGraw Center’s Jessica Del Vecchio will facilitate.
Directions
Get directions to the Drapkin Studio, located on the second level of the Wallace Dance Building at the Lewis Arts complex.
Accessibility
The Drapkin Studio is an accessible venue with an assistive listening system. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at lewiscenter@princeton.edu.
