糖心Vlog

Stephanie Fleischmann, who teaches playwriting in the Department of Theater, is one of nine recipients of a Fellowship for 2014鈥�15, which will enable her to develop a new play, Sound House, over the next year.

Established in 1952 at Brown University by Nicea Howard in memory of her grandparents, the Howard Foundation annually awards approximately 10 fellowships to early and mid-career recipients who have achieved recognition for at least one major project. The fellowships provide artists and scholars in the creative arts (including photography, painting, music, and playwriting) and in historical and critical studies (including history, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy) with time to complete their work.

Sound House, a dark comedy, is the story of Daphne, 鈥渁 kind of vaudevillian female Clark Kent destined to save the world from its shortcomings by dint of her own awkwardness. She is obsessed with and inspired by the work and sound world of British inventor/composer Daphne Oram (1925-2003), an obsession that ultimately provides her namesake with the means to build her own 鈥榮ound house鈥�,鈥� explains Fleischmann.

Oram invented the Oramics Machine, 鈥渁 graphical system for generating sound, predating the synthesizer by a decade,鈥� according to Fleischmann. Oram also was the creator in 1957 of the BBC鈥檚 first-ever fully electronic score鈥攆or Amphytryon 38, a radio drama鈥攑aving the way for the BBC鈥檚 Radiophonic Workshop, which Oram co-founded in 1958. That same year she composed the score for Samuel Beckett鈥檚 radio play All That Fall.... She received modest notice for her work, but as a woman operating in a male-dominated field during the mid-20^th century, her profile was fairly low and she died in extreme poverty, according to Fleischmann. A substantial archive of her work has been established at Goldsmith鈥檚 University in London, and Fleischmann plans to visit the archive for research.

She says that her play 鈥渨ill center on the condition of feeling/being invisible. I am interested in how sound helps us to see. And inversely, how sound might serve as a kind of cloak, a theatrical means of communicating the condition of invisibility. It is the character Daphne鈥檚 obsession with Daphne Oram that will, ultimately, liberate her from the condition of invisibility, and in so doing, in a faintly superhero style, liberate the world from that which is oppressing, in particular, those who are in our culture invisible.鈥�

The story of the two Daphnes will be told in an unorthodox format and promises some surprising developments, according to the playwright. Ultimately, she hopes 鈥渢o make a theater piece that is as haunting and surprising, and innovative as Oram鈥檚 work.鈥�

Fleischmann calls her theater pieces 鈥渂lueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds. My work mines a theater of images, the spectacle in a story, the emotional resonance and narrative space implicit in sound. For me, it is the combustion鈥攐r alchemy鈥攐f language, image, soundscape, and technology that becomes a medium for telling stories.鈥�

A 糖心Vlog faculty member since 2005, Fleischman has earned notice for her theater works. The New York Times has referenced her 鈥渓yrical monologues鈥� and Backstage has called her a 鈥渘eo Emily Dickinson.鈥� She has developed a number of theater pieces, including Tally Ho, The Street of Useful things, Red Fly/Blue Bottle, and Eloise & Ray, among others, for venues throughout Europe and the United States.

Her current commissions include librettos for The Property, for Lyric Opera of Chicago, which premieres in February 2015, and The Long Walk, based on the memoir by Brian Castner. Commissioned by the American Lyric Theater, The Long Walk received a 2013 Opera America development grant, and this June, the project will be workshopped at the DiMenna Center in New York City and subsequently featured in the Opera America Conference鈥檚 New Works Forum in San Francisco.

She is currently collaborating with Brian Mertes and Melissa Kievman on a screenplay for Chekhov鈥檚 The Seagull and with Andy Dawson on The Russian Doctor, inspired by Chekhov鈥檚 sole full-length prose piece, Sakhalin Island. The Russian Doctor will be presented May 9 at Mass MoCA.

Fleischmann is a former Tennessee Williams fellow in playwriting at Sewanee and holds an M.F.A. degree from Brooklyn College.