Talking Back: Join us for a conversation after the show

We are proud to announce an incredible roster of artists, academics and legal practitioners who will participate in a conversation with the audience, cast and production team about art, authority, inspiration and appropriation after each performance.

Participants' bios follow.

May 13:

Mark Sam Rosenthal

Sonia Katyal

May 14:

Alfred Steiner

May 15:

Virginia Rutledge

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MARK SAM ROSENTHAL is a Baton Rouge native living in New York. His solo show, Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire, had a nine-week off-Broadway run at New York’s SoHo Playhouse in winter 2009 and a summer 2009 run at the Art House Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Blanche premiered to sell-out crowds at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, where it won the Village Voice Audience Award. Mark Sam has studied and performed improv comedy with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and his comedy sketches have been performed there and in San Francisco by the sketch group Killing My Lobster. He performs at storytelling shows like Kevin Allison’s RISK!, The Nights of Our Lives, Stripped Stories, and Reading for Filth. Other writing and performing credits include his solo show Love Mercy (People’s Improv Theater), Menage a Trailer (co-writer, Chicago’s Factory Theater), Beyond the Valley of the Switchblade Pussycats (UCBT), The Indigo Girls vs. George W. Bush (The Cutting Room), and Jollyship the Whiz-Bang’s Little Building (Galapagos). Mark Sam works currently as a writer/producer for Comedy Central.

Blanche Survives Katrina is a scathing look at the government's response to Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of Blanche Dubois, the leading lady in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. The production team behind Blanche Survives Katrina received a cease and desist letter from the University of the South, which owns the rights to the Williams' play, threatening litigation if the production was not stopped. After retaining pro bono counsel, the production team decided to finish the run.


PROFESSOR SONIA KATYAL teaches in the areas of intellectual property, property, and civil rights at Fordham Law School. Sonia's scholarly work focuses on intellectual property, civil rights (including gender and sexuality), art, civil disobedience, and new media. Her articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, in addition, shorter pieces have appeared in The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Katyal's recently published Property Outlaws (co-authored with Eduardo M. Penalver), Yale University Press.
In 2008, Katyal was awarded a grant from the Warhol Foundation for her second book, Contrabrand.

Katyal is a graduate of Brown University, and received her JD from the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, Professor Katyal clerked for the Honorable Carlos Moreno (now a California Supreme Court Justice) in the Central District of California and the Honorable Dorothy Nelson in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.


ALFRED STEINER is an artist and lawyer living in New York. His work has been been reviewed in The New Yorker and The Harvard Crimson, and has appeared in group shows at such venues as The Brucennial 2010, BravinLee Programs, Exit Art, Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects, The New School, No Longer Empty, Silver Shed, and Swarm Gallery. In 1995, Mr. Steiner received a B.S. in mathematics and a B.A. in philosophy from Miami University. Alfred received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1998 and has been practicing law for the past ten years at Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he advises clients on intellectual property and technology-related matters.


VIRGINIA RUTLEDGE is a New York-based attorney with experience across many sectors of the media and content industries, in both commercial and nonprofit contexts. She began her legal career as a litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, representing major clients including Time Warner Inc. and the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. From Cravath she joined the nonprofit Creative Commons as Vice President and General Counsel, serving as lead legal advisor and working on strategic development. Currently, she is in private practice, advising artists, authors, cultural organizations, collectors, and dealers on intellectual property, transactions, and new enterprises. Virginia is also an art historian and was formerly an exhibition associate at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She speaks frequently on art and law, and has written for Art in America, Bookforum and Artforum. She is a member of the New York State Bar, and chairs the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.