The New Stage Theatre Company’s ‘Near to the Wild Heart’

Sarah Lemp, Markus Hirnigel. Photo by Nonoka Judit Sipos.

    2020 marks the centennial of Clarice Lispector's birth.  The Ukrainian-Jewish refugee who settled in Brazil has long been acclaimed as a feminist trailblazer in male dominated South American literature.  Fortunately, her canon is newly translated into English.   The New Stage Theatre Company celebrates Lispector with an evocatively uncompromising adaptation of Near to the Wild Heart.  Artistic director Ildiko Nemeth's production is both an English-language premiere and first-ever North American stage adaptation of Lispector's 1943 debut novel. Lispector's writing is semi-autobiographical and surreal - the artistically experimental, not the hashtag kind.  The "Wild Heart" belongs to Joana (Sarah Lemp), who is smart, bored and unhappily married to Otavio

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