An actor, a graphic novelist and a mathematician will deliver Assembly Series lectures over the next week.
Tony award winner B.D. Wong will give the talk “All the World’s a Stage: From Exclusion to Inclusion“ at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 23, in Graham Chapel.
Wong gained national attention with his Broadway debut starring in M. Butterfly in the role of Song Liling. For his performance, Wong won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award. Wong’s other critically acclaimed musical performances include the revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.
Some of Wong’s TV roles include forensic psychiatrist George Huang in the NBC hit “Law and Order: SVU,” Father Ray Mukada in “OZ,” the sensational HBO production set in a maximum-security prison, and a co-starring role in the 1994 ABC situation comedy, “All American Girl,” which featured America’s first Asian-American family.
Besides his impressive work in Broadway musicals and his dramatic and comedic work in television, Wong has performed memorable roles in films such as Jurassic Park, The Freshman, Seven Years in Tibet and as a particularly zany wedding planner in Father of the Bride. He lent his voice to Disney’s Mulan as Captain Li Shang.
In production is Wong’s directorial debut, East Broadway, a story about a Chinese-American girl who longs to be part of New York high society.
It wasn’t until Wong landed his role in M. Butterfly that he learned to accept and have pride in his Asian-American background. He then was able to shed what he calls his “racial anorexia.” Wong will discuss his journey from adolescent racial self-hatred to eventual self-acceptance and from struggling with inequality to breaking down barriers in his personal and professional lives.
Iranian-born graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi will discuss her work at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, in Graham Chapel.
Satrapi’s work that has been published in English includes Persepolis, Persepolis 2, Embroideries and the recently released Chicken With Plums. In each, she tells her stories not only with words, but with pictures. These graphic novels, sometimes called comics, represent the fastest growing area of publishing.
Satrapi, who was born in Rasht, Iran, left as a teenager to study in Vienna, Austria, and later to study decorative arts in Strasbourg, France. In 1994, she moved to Paris where she was introduced to l’Atelier des Vosges, home to many of France’s comic-book artists. It was there that she was convinced to put her stories and drawings into print.
Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s experiences as a youth in Iran living through the Islamic Revolution and the War with Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a story about an ordinary but also outrageous childhood. Persepolis won critical acclaim in France, has received a number of awards and has been compared favorably to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Persepolis 2 is the second half of her story.
In Chicken With Plums, Satrapi chronicles the last eight days in the life of a great uncle who, according to family lore, decided to lie down and die after his wife destroyed his musical instrument, a tar, over her knee.
Satrapi lives in Paris where her illustrations appear regularly in newspapers and magazines. Her work also appeared this summer in The New York Times. She is at work on an animated film adaptation of Persepolis.
Cornell University mathematician Steven Strogatz will speak on “Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26, in Rebstock Hall, Room 215.
Widely recognized for his groundbreaking discoveries in chaos and complexity theory, Strogatz is a pioneer in the cutting-edge science of synchrony, the hidden order that governs the rhythms of nature, which can be seen in fireflies flashing in unison, sleep patterns, the behavior of cancer cells, consciousness arising from the interplay of millions of brain cells, riots and fads.
It also can be seen in inanimate systems, such as traffic-flow patterns, electrons in a superconductor and quantum mechanics.
His 2003 book, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, outlines his research on how individual members within a complex system can influence a spontaneous reaction affecting the behavior of the entire group.
His work has been featured in many publications, including Nature, Science, Scientific American, Newsweek, The New York Times, Die Zeit and broadcast on BBC radio, National Public Radio, CBS News and numerous other mass media outlets.
Strogatz is a professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1980, bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cambridge University in 1982 and 1986, and a doctorate in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1986.
He taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard before joining the Cornell faculty in 1994.
These events are free and open to the public. For more information, call 935-4620 or go online to assemblyseries.wustl.edu.