NEW YORK CITY - On Monday, November 15th, 2010, the Writer’s Guild of America, East Foundation hosted a benefit performance of Jules Feiffer: Funny Side Up at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street.
Funny Side Up is a ninety-minute autobiographical tour of the life of celebrated author and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. In it, Feiffer takes the audience through his extraordinary career using a slideshow of comic strips, both his own and his contemporaries and the masters who inspired him as a boy. He highlights some of his artwork that has never before been shown in public. Feiffer specially crafted his solo performance for this benefit and it was the first time he performed it in New York! The evening was a one-of-a-kind celebration of one of the great artistic lights of New York City. Special appearances were made by Robert Klein, Bill Irwin and Mike Nichols. Michael Weller spoke on behalf of the WGAE Foundation. A brief question and answer session led by Eric Bogosian and Marsha Norman followed the presentation.
Jules Feiffer’s Pulitzer-winning comic strip ran for 42 years in the Village Voice as well as 100 other papers. He is the author of the Obie-award winning Little Murders, the screenplay for the film Carnal Knowledge and Oscar-winning animated short, Munro. Through his use of biting humor and illustrations over the past six decades, Feiffer has graphically captured American social change and cultural mood. He has also made us laugh and laugh as we’ve found ourselves and our politicians at his mercy.
As a playwright, Feiffer also wrote the Tony-nominated Knock Knock and Grown-Ups. As a novelist, he wrote Harry, the Rat with Women and Ackroyd. He has also illustrated numerous books including Which Puppy? by his daughter Kate and the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Academy Award and the Venice Film Festival award for best screenplay. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995 and inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004. Most recently, Feiffer’s autobiography, Backing Into Forward was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
Honorary chairpersons for the benefit performance of Jules Feiffer: Funny Side Up are: Alan Arkin, Candice Bergen, Kristen Chenoweth, Paul Dooley, Art Garfunkel, Elliott Gould, John Guare, Sheldon Harnick, Hugh Hefner, Bill Irwin, Robert Klein, Arthur Kopit, John Lithgow, Emily Mann, Bill Moyers, Richard Nelson, Mike Nichols, Oliver Platt, Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Sondheim, Gay & Nan Talese and Robin Williams.
The Writers Guild of America, East Foundation is the charitable foundation of the Writers Guild of America, East. The WGAE Foundation is an organization of top professional writers in the country who volunteer their writing skills in the service of underserved populations. During the last few years, the Foundation has been especially active and vital. It has developed writing workshops in Ohio and Texas for military veterans; started book clubs that bring celebrity performers and celebrated writers to underserved schools where they read aloud from favorite texts and promote their enthusiasm for literature; partnered with the Screen Actors Guild Foundation in a program called PencilPals that develops relationships between working writers and grade school students who have writing ambitions, and funded the Baltimore Sun fellowship program. In addition, it awards the Michael Collyer Fellowship in Screenwriting and has cooperative ventures with the ScenariosUSA organization and The Free Speech Leadership Group. One of its next projects will be a writing workshop with public school teachers in Detroit.
The work of the Board and all the other writers who participate is done entirely on a volunteer basis. The Foundation’s board of directors is: Tom Fontana, Michael Weller, John Markus, Rick Dresser, Jim Hart, Lulie Haddad, Chris Albers, Andrew Bergman, Eric Bogosian, Marshall Brickman, Nora Ephron, Richard LaGravenese, Warren Leight, Kenneth Lonergan, Jenny Lumet, Marsha Norman, Eric Overmyer, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, John Patrick Shanley, Susanna Styron, David Simon, Jim Yoshimura, Michael Winship, Lowell Peterson and Executive Director Marsha Manns.
Vineyard Gazette Online November 26th, 2010
Jules Feiffer’s Broadway Benefit Has Pages Dancing Across Stage
By LAUREN MARTIN
Like an elongated dancer in one of his drawings, lanky Jules Feiffer loped in, stretched out his fingers and curtseyed to the standing ovation that greeted his arrival on the Broadway stage last Monday night. Knees bent, he cocked his head and lifted his eyebrows,simultaneously sheepish and soaking it all up.
As soon as the applause died, of course, he stuffed his hands in his suit pockets, shuffled off to the side and muttered into his microphone a warning to himself not to take a pratfall off the stage.
The man who began his career with A Guide to Non-Confident Living (that was the subtitle to his longrunning Village Voice comic strip Sick Sick Sick) knows his schtick.
“Self-deprecation is a way that we show off,” he said, taking his central contradiction head-on as he settled in to give a benefit performance for the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation.. (Read More!)
