The David O. Nilsson Lecture in Contemporary Drama takes yet another wild turn this year with Austin Chronicle Arts Editor Robert Faires stepping in to reprise an excerpted version of his notable one-man take on Henry V.

The performance – titled “This is Not a Pipe” – will take place in the Capitol Room of the Blanton Museum of Art‘s Edgar A. Smith Building at 5:30 pm on Thursday, April 1. A reception will precede the event beginning at 4:30 pm.

The original version of Faires’s Henry played last summer at The Off Center Theater and garnered enthusiastic reviews for its combination of spare presentation and complex performance. Faires will pare down the previous version while attempting to further disrupt the partition between audience and actor in this modernist perspective on Shakespeare’s epic history play.

The Nilsson Lecture was founded through the generosity of Dr. David O. Nilsson, a retired mathematics instructor at The University of Texas at Austin, independent scholar and Henrik Ibsen aficionado.

Past lectures have featured the Swedish novelist Lars Gustaffson (speaking on paradox in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), and director of Shakespeare at Winedale James Loehlin (on Stanislavski’s contrarian production of The Cherry Orchard), and an entertaining panel of local playwrights including internationally-renowned Kirk Lynn and Keene Prize winner George Brant (discussing the state and fate of theater). Last year’s lecture featured alternating performance and discussion of scenes from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing featuring British actress Eunice Roberts and notable local actors Matthew Radford and David Stahl.

Please RSVP to (512)495-4363 or emcquade@austin.utexas.edu, or at the Facebook page if you plan to attend.