Arts & Culture

Eric Wright*Hiroshima Maiden*In 1955, a group of 25 women disfigured by the nuclear blast at Hiroshima visited the United States to undergo reconstructive surgery. Their bizarre odyssey climaxed on the television program “This Is Your Life” in a live, face-to-face meeting with Enola Gay pilot Robert Lewis. In Hiroshima Maiden, performance artist Dan Hurlin recreates this stranger-than-fiction tale though a combination of Japanese Bunraku-style puppetry and dance. The show makes its St. Louis debut Friday and Saturday, April 22 and 23, as part of the Edison Theatre OVATIONS! Series.

Acclaimed writer and physician Rafael Campo will read from his work at 7 p.m., Friday, April 15, at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The talk is free and open to the public and is sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum’s Inside Out Loud: Women’s Health in Contemporary Art (through April 24).

Anita Diamant, author of the bestselling novel, The Red Tent, will deliver the Women’s Society of Washington University Adele Starbird Lecture for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m., Wednesday, April 20th in Graham Chapel. Her talk is entitled “Imagining the Past: A Conversation with Anita Diamant.”

Washington University’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will present A Concert on Women’s Mental Health at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 12, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The performance, which will feature compositions based on poems by Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, is free and open to the public and held in conjunction with the exhibition Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’s Health in Contemporary Art.

LightmanAlan Lightman, popular novelist and MIT physicist, will deliver the ArtSci Council, Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi Lecture for Washington University’s Assembly Series. His talk, “The Physicist as Novelist,” will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday, April 13, in Graham Chapel.

MacFarlaneThe animated adult series, “Family Guy,” broke the mold for its genre, created a large cult fan base, and made its creator, 33-year-old Seth MacFarlane, famous. MacFarlane will talk about his controversial series for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. Wed., March 30, in Graham Chapel.

Eric WoolseyInto the WoodsWhat happens after “happily ever after”? Find out when the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences presents the Into The Woods — Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical amalgam of fairy tale favorites — as its spring Mainstage production April 1-3 and 8-10.

Jill KrementzJames LapineVeteran Broadway writer, librettist and director James Lapine will introduce Washington University’s production of Into the Woods, his 1987 collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, with a talk at 7 p.m. Friday, April 1.

Jerry BauerBidartAward-winning poet Frank Bidart, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 24. In addition, Bidart will give a talk on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 31.

The Washington University Opera will present Lee Hoiby’s A Month in the Country — based on the play by Ivan Turgenev — at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 18 and 19. The piece is something of a lost gem in the world of opera: first adapted in 1964 for the New York City Opera, under the title Natalia Petrovna, it was revised in 1980 but had gone years without a performance until last December, when the Manhattan School of Music launched a well-received production.