The campus interview program “UO Today” recently featured conversations with two scholars whose work covers Mexican laborers in the Northwest and a new University Theatre play that recently began a run at Robinson Theatre.
Host Paul Peppis, a UO English professor, talks with theater arts professor Michael Malek Najjar about the new play and former Oregon resident Mario Sifuentez, now a history professor at the University of California, Merced.
“UO Today” is a half-hour program offered by the Oregon Humanities Center. The most recent interviews, and those held previously, are available on the UO Today website.
Najjar, a UO theater arts professor, is the director of “James Joyce’s The Dead,” which began its run on campus Nov. 4. The play is a musical adaptation of a short story from Joyce’s collection “Dubliners” that was performed on Broadway in 2000.
University Theatre tries to do a musical every other year, Najjar said, and he remembered seeing “James Joyce’s The Dead” in Los Angeles and being impressed with its focus on people, family and relationships.
“I thought that this year I’d like to find something that was really about family,” Najjar said, “something that was really about a group of people coming together and something that had a really deep, resonant message.”
The production runs Nov. 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 13 at 2 p.m. at the UO’s Robinson Theatre. Tickets are $12 adults, $10 seniors (65+), $10 UO faculty and staff, $10 non-UO students and free for all UO students.
Tickets are available at https://tickets.uoregon.edu/james-joyces-dead or by calling the UO Ticket Office at 541-346-4363.
Besides discussing the play, Najjar also delves into his book “Arab American Drama, Film and Performance.”
In an Oct. 28 interview, Peppis talks with Sifuentez about his new book, “Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest.” Sifuentez grew up in Eastern Oregon in a family of immigrant farm workers from Mexico and graduated from the UO with a triple major in political science, history and ethnic studies.
He originally planned a career as an activist, working to help organize unions or defending the rights of marginalized people. But he told Peppis he had always been curious about the history of immigrant labor in the Northwest and nagged by the apparent lack of any serious research or writing on the subject.
Then Sifuentez was challenged by one of his mentors at the UO to take on the project, and get a graduate degree, two things he had never considered doing.
“The idea of writing a book had never crossed my mind,” he said. “And all of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I should write that book.”
Sifuentez went on to get a doctorate from Brown University and become a scholar in the history of immigration, farm workers and labor as well as food studies. He is currently working on an oral history project in California’s Central Valley.