Presented in collaboration with the Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival and the International Congress on Medieval Studies, WMU Theatre will premiere an ambitious new adaptation of the 13th-century narrative poemThe Book of Silence at this year’s Medieval Congress, May 9 – 25. The production, a collaboration between director and co-author Lofty Durham and co-author and medieval studies scholar Wally Cornell, will bring contemporary relevance to an 800-year-old text.
“The play is a staging of an ancient work, but we’ve adapted it for modern audiences,” says Durham. “It’s about a knight, assigned female at birth, who is raised as a boy due to restrictive inheritance laws. It’s a powerful story about identity and self-discovery.”
Cornell, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and co-author of the adaptation, explains the broader context of the work. “The Book of Silence challenges long-standing ideas about gender and identity,” he said. “It shows that even in the Middle Ages, people were questioning societal norms.”…