Contemporaries

ADAPTED FROM “The Slow Burn: A Summer of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels” by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards 

“We can’t be your inspiration. We’re dysfunctional thirtysomething professors, nothing interesting happens in our lives until we get tenure. Until then, our existence is just a big waiting game.” 

It’s official–after a successful staged reading this fall, Contemporaries will be presented as a full production this April! 

Contemporaries follows four professors–Sarah, Jill, Merve, and Katherine–writing to get tenure, who fall in love with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, and find themselves within her characters. As they struggle to survive in academia, they must deal with the consequences of the charade they play, blurring the lines between their realities and fiction. On female friendship, sexism in academia, motherhood, spaghetti-cooking, and dog-sitting (those who read the event description for the staged reading weren’t expecting those last two, were they?) 

If you have any questions, or would like to get involved, please email producer Jocelyn Wexler at jocelyn.wexler@yale.edu.