FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 6, 2005

CONTACT: Lisa Lacher, (515) 271-3119, lisa.lacher@drake.edu

CLAUDIA STEVENS TO PERFORM ONE-WOMAN SHOW AT DRAKE

On Wednesday, April 13, Claudia Stevens will give her one-woman performance as pianist, singer and actor in "A Table Before Me," a musical drama she created to convey the terror and turmoil experienced by her mother's family during the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. The performance, which is free and open to the public, will start at 7 p.m. in the Performing Arts Hall in the Harmon Fine Arts Center, 25th Street and Carpenter Avenue.

To her own accompaniment of period music, Stevens enacts the roles of Nazi bureaucrats and of her increasingly desperate, harried grandfather, as he struggles to comply with crippling taxes, legal restrictions and violence against the Jewish community of Vienna. She creates an atmosphere of increasing brutality and grotesqueness, as members of the Sinai family are stripped of property, dignity and life in prelude to the "Final Solution."

Stevens is a leading performing artist, playwright and composer. Her unique repertoire of one-person musical theater works has been called "wonderful, both as art and in its pathos" by Nobel laureate Roald Hoffman. Ellis Cose, contributing editor to Newsweek magazine, says her work "derives its power from her journey of self discovery to an infinitely larger quest."

Stevens holds degrees in music from Vassar College, the University of California at Berkeley and Boston University. She has held academic and conducting positions at Williams College and the College of William and Mary, where she is currently an associate professor of piano. As pianist and composer, she has been presented at Carnegie Recital Hall by the New York Composers' Forum and was the featured artist on several NPR broadcasts. As a performance artist, she has received grants from the International Theater Institute, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as numerous artist residencies.

During the current season Stevens has appeared in performance of her own solo works at Stages Repertory Theater in Houston, at the Cornelia Street Cabaret in New York, and at universities including Case Western, Purdue, Bucknell and Kansas. Next season she will be in residence as a playwright and music-theater artist at Colgate University and Cornell University, among others.

For more information about Stevens' performance at Drake, call (515) 271-3563. The Drake Women's Studies Program and the Drake Humanities Center are sponsoring the event. Admission is free.

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