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MODERN CLASSICS AUDIO PLAYS
The Shawna Foundation Presents the New Classics Audio Play Series, where we reframe timeless stories through a modern lens.
Alice Gerstenberg (1885–1972) was a bold and inventive voice in American theater, best known for experimenting with form and for her commitment to women’s voices on stage. Written in 1914, The Illuminati in Drama Libre is a sharp, satirical play that challenges authority, censorship, and the gatekeepers of art.
Gerstenberg was writing during a time of immense change—the women’s suffrage movement, social upheaval, and radical shifts in art and culture. Her play pokes fun at institutions that tried to silence creativity and limit who could tell stories, echoing the struggles of women and artists of her era.
Today, more than a century later, the questions she raised still feel urgent. Who controls art? Whose stories are told? How do power and censorship shape what audiences get to see and hear? The Illuminati in Drama Libre reminds us that theater can be both playful and political, a place to laugh while also questioning the world around us.
We revisit Gerstenberg’s work not only to honor a pioneering feminist playwright, but also to show how her spirit of defiance and experimentation continues to inspire.
Creating Dangerously
Creating Dangerously, is based on the lecture by Albert Camus which he gave on December 14, 1957 at Uppsala University in Sweden, four days after he gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature.


In it he said “To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing."
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He said this 12 years after the end of World War II, in which he played a major role in the French Underground. Being a witness to the holocaust, fascism, Stalin’s crimes against humanity and the dropping of the atom bomb twice only helped confirm his philosophy of absurdism which he had formed in the shadows of World War I which took his father.
What has changed? We have lived through things like the September 11 attack, to a pandemic to the new threat of the rise of fascism globally. Again. This century also forgives nothing.


With hosts Skip Shea, Patrick Bracken and Andrea Wolanin we will explore artists past and present who are doing their part to create dangerously to try to make sense of a world that often doesn't make sense at all.

We'll have three different releases monthly, with that will include the monthly discussion surrounding certain themes. Like satire. Then we will offer interviews with the likes of Adam McKay, Luigi Cozzi and Catherine Marenghi. We'll bring in Tony Brown, the winner of the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Medal, to discuss poetry. And other surprises that even we aren't aware of!
And maybe then you'll want to pick up a pen or a brush and join us in creating dangerously.
If you have any questions or comments email us at creatingdangerouslypodcast@gmail.com
