City Lit’s Books on the Chopping Block Readings
at Kate the Great’s Book Emporium During Banned Books Week
City Lit Theater Company’s Books on the Chopping Block, its celebration of Banned Books Week (September 23-30) produced in collaboration with the American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom, will perform for free at Kate the Great’s Book Emporium at 5550 North Broadway in Chicago on Wednesday, September 27 at 7:00 p.m.
Books on the Chopping Block is the inaugural show in City Lit’s 2006-2007 concert readings series at its new second space at Gallery Mornea art gallery in downtown Evanston. (See separate enclosed release.)
“Kate the Great’s is City Lit’s neighborhood bookstore,” said City Lit artistic director Terry McCabe. “We love it there because it’s beautiful and intimate. They have a great program of live performances in the evenings, and we are happy to be part of the mix.”
Books on the Chopping Block is an 80-minute program of readings from the nine books that faced expulsion from the high school curriculum in suburban Cook County this spring: “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World” by Michael Pollan, “Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers, “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. The cast of Books on the Chopping Block is Thad Anzur, Cameron Feagin, Katy Nielsen, and Tom Shea, directed by McCabe.
Banned Books Week – Celebrating the Freedom to Read – is observed annually in the last week of September. For more on Banned Books Week, visit www.ala.org/bbooks. “City Lit is privileged to join with the ALA in this important work,” McCabe said. “Our focus is literate theatre, so we are naturally concerned by attempts to keep books away from people. Concert readings of excerpts from challenged books actively celebrate the books most at risk and call attention to the would-be censor's threat to an educated democracy.”