more at the center

Thursday, March 15, 2012, 7:30 pm
Friday, March 16, 2012, 11 am
Wallace Shawn wears two hats. He is beloved for his comedic roles as a film and stage actor, in such works as My Dinner with Andre and The Princess Bride. A playwright and an essayist, he is revered for his exploration of difficult, often controversial themes. Much of his writing in his collection Essays (2009) has the same cadence as the dialogue in his award-winning plays and screenplays — bold assertions, often provocative, that outrage and even startle. In 2005 Wallace Shawn received the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for “showing the way to a new kind of theater....”

Thursday, April 19, 2012, 7:30 pm
Friday, April 20, 2012, 11 am
Dr. Brian Greene is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists and author of the national bestsellers, The Elegant Universe and The Hidden Reality. A brilliant, entertaining communicator of cutting-edge scientific concepts, Greene was described by The Washington Post as “the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today.” In 2008, he co-founded the annual World Science Festival. The festival’s mission is to take science out of the labratory, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating to the general public.

Thursday, May 10, 2012, 7:30 pm
Friday, May 11, 2012, 11 am
Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy champion. His first novel, Prague, was named a New York Times Notable Book and received The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. Author of five novels, including Egyptologist and The Song is You, Arthur’s work has been translated into twenty-five languages and is the source of three films currently in development. His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published in April 2011.