WOOLF ARTS ARCHIVE

Literature Recital with Dr. Ben Leubner
Ben Laubner
Recital
4 August 2024
Montana, United States of America
Actor and Montana State University professor Ben Leubner presented a one-hour recital of two pieces of twentieth-century literature at the Tippet Rise Arts Center in Fishtail, Montana. Beginning outdoors at Francis Kéré’s Xylem, Ben recited Elizabeth Bishop’s 1971 dramatic monologue, “Crusoe in England,” and followed it with a long excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 lyrical novel, The Waves, in the Olivier Music Barn. Both works feature their authors reflecting on the contours of life from the vantage point of age and maturity, but through the prism of a fictional character. In Bishop’s poem, that character is Daniel Defoe’s famous eighteenth-century castaway, Robinson Crusoe, while in Woolf’s novel it is a character of her own creation, Bernard, who concludes the novel with a long monologue from which this excerpt was taken.


