Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay Shows at the 92nd Street Y

image via 92nd Street Y

If you recall that Jack Kerouac, a native French speaker, read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, you may be interested in Harold Pinter’s screenplay of it at the 92nd Street Y:

In 1972, Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay from Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past.

Decades later, Pinter and directing partner Di Trevis adapted the never-filmed script for the National Theatre in London. It has never been produced in the US. In celebration of Pinter’s long friendship with the Poetry Center and the centenary of Swann’s Way, we present a staged reading of the play, affording us “the pleasure of providing yet another angle of perception upon a work so elaborate and many-faceted it never fails to give back new light,” wrote John Updike.

Here is the key facts:

Date: Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 8 pm

Location: Lexington Avenue at 92nd St

Venue: Kaufmann Concert Hall

Price: from $27.00

Pinter wrote “memory plays,” works like No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978 — and yes, it was once alluded to on an episode of Seinfeld), which deal with the chronology of time and the way memory warps. He also acted and his last performance was as none other than the title character in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape — fitting, you see, since the play is about an older man reviewing his earlier years.

Kerouac too was writing about memory as he mythologized himself in his series of semi-autobiographic novels, which he called The Legend of Duluoz.

Tags: 92nd Street Y, Beat Generation, Di Trevis, French, Harold Pinter, Jack Kerouac, Marcel Proust, memory, Samuel Beckett, Seinfeld