Life without Roses: A solo play based on the life and work of Margaret Anderson, by June Sawyers will be on stage at the historic Fine Arts Building, Friday, April 12, 2013, from 7.30 p.m. to 9 p.m. and Friday, April 26, 2013, from 7.30 p.m. to 9 p.m.. Cynthia Judge will portray Margaret Anderson.
Life without Roses is a solo play about the life and work of Margaret Anderson, the unconventional editor of the seminal literary magazine, The Little Review, during the heady days of the Chicago literary renaissance of the early twentieth century. For a few brief but colorful years, Anderson was the toast of the town and the undisputed queen of the city's bohemian community.
In 1914 Anderson founded The Little Review and moved into Room 917 (and later Room 834) of the Fine Arts Building. The first issue, which contained articles on Nietzsche, feminism, and psychoanalysis, made a big splash. The magazine's motto too was bold and unconventional: it promised to make "no compromise with public taste." Living up to its motto, it published the best poetry, criticism, and artwork available without regard to fashion, politics, or convention. Devoted to art for art's sake, The Little Review introduced many of the best-known American, English, French, and Irish writers of the twentieth century to its readers, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson as well as T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Emma Goldman, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein.
Anderson wrote a three-volume autobiography, My Thirty Years' War in 1930 (on which Life without Roses is primarily based), The Fiery Fountains in 1951, and The Strange Necessity in 1962, as well as a work of fiction, Forbidden Fires, in 1996.
The performance will take place in the The Anna Morgan Studio, Room 825, in the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago. Admission is $10.
Parking is available in the Millennium Street garage.
There will be a reception of wine and cheese immediately following the performance.
Please RSVP to 312-435-9736 or e-mail skinsaw@aol.com .
Seating is limited.