Play reading: Livia: A Roman Tragedy
LIVIA: A Roman Tragedy by Paul David Young
An evil, corrupt, narcissistic emperor has seized the throne, and the late Roman Empire is in chaos. Livia longs for her lover, who has left Rome to lead the forces gathered in rebellion against the incompetent, debauched emperor. She tries to understand how the once noble Roman republic has crumbled and Rome has succumbed to the tyrant’s hand. She struggles with the feeling that she is isolated in her opposition to and loathing of the demented clown who exiles, imprisons, and executes those brave enough to struggle against the horrid dictator. What can she do to save her society?
Livia: A Roman Tragedy, though set in ancient Rome, is an urgent message for our time.
Livia quotes the dramatic literature situated in ancient Rome, such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra, and other Roman plays by Corneille, Ibsen, and Dürrenmatt, as well as Roman philosophers Seneca, Cicero, and Epictetus, and the German sociologist/philosopher Norbert Elias.
A reading at Time and Space Limited in Hudson, New York, July 25 at 7 pm
[$10 donation requested for the benefit of TSL; reserve with link below]
https://timeandspace.org/events/7-25-25-livia-reading/
MARIANNA GAILUS (Livia) was born and raised in New York City and received her M.F.A. from the Juilliard School Drama Division as a proud member of Group 51. Marianna earned a B.A. in History from Yale University, where she studied the intersections between American public history, cultural collective memory, and methodologies of storytelling. She also studied maritime and global history at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She recently performed the one-person play VANYA (adapted from Chekhov by Simon Stephens, directed by Sam Yates) off-Broadway as Andrew Scott’s understudy. Selected credits include Broadway: Patriots. New York: cityscrape (Good Apples Collective). Regional: Pride & Prejudice (Cleveland Playhouse). Juilliard credits include Halina in Indecent, Masha in Three Sisters, Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, and Ren in The Extenders (film). Marianna was the 2022 recipient of Juilliard’s Laura Pels Prize in Acting for outstanding achievement. When not onstage, she works at the South Street Seaport Museum on their historic ships and volunteers at the American Museum of Natural History as a tour guide and exhibit interpreter.
PAUL DAVID YOUNG’s play A Picnic for Orpheus was presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in New York in a reading in June 2025 in its Experiments series. His All My Fathers was presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in New York in fall 2019 as part of La MaMa’s 58th season. Evan Yionoulis, an Obie winner, formerly Professor in the Practice of Acting and Directing at Yale School of Drama and Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre for twenty years and now Richard Rodgers Director of Drama at Juilliard, directed the production, which was praised in The New Yorker (“hilarious “); The Reviews Hub (five stars * * * * *: “All My Fathers is remarkable work and should not be missed.”); Interludes (RECOMMENDED); Theater Is Easy (“performances that are both hilarious and poignant”); Theater Pizzazz (“Young’s humor is salient and sardonic. The actors are just terrific.”); and Lighting & Sound America (“Packed with curveballs, All My Fathers is also a work of considerable literacy.”). His 2017 Trump satire, Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal, performed by four clowns at Judson Church, was featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Village Voice (“Voice Choice”), The Wall Street Journal, and Hyperallergic. Upstage Downstage picked his play Kentucky Cantata, at HERE in New York, as one of the top 13 plays of Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway for 2015. Erik Haagensen of Backstage selected his In the Summer Pavilion in NYCFringe and at 59e59 Theaters as a “Critic’s Pick.” His No One But You won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and was a finalist for the Kendeda Fellowship. His one-act Aporiawas a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s John Cauble Short Play Award. His translations, with Carl Weber, of Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome and Macbeth were published as Heiner Müller: After Shakespeare. At the 2025 PEN World Voices Festival, he performed his translation of a part of Daniel Kehlmann’s play Ostern. He has written performance criticism extensively for The Brooklyn Rail, PAJ (MIT Press), and Hyperallergic. His book newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic, about visual artists appropriating theatre, was issued by PAJ in 2014. He has had residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace, Millay Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Summer Conference. LMCC awarded him a five-month Process Space residency on Governors Island for 2015, where he conceived and performed Curtain Wall Part 3: An Immersive Landscape Theater Performance of Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” in which he swam across New York Harbor. http://www.pauldavidyoung.com/