Robin Hirsch Set for Cornelia Street Cafe's SHAKESPEARE: A TWO-PART INVENTION Tonight

Cornelia Street Café presents Shakespeare: A Two-Part Invention featuring Robin Hirsch and John Hudson tonight, April 28th at 6pm.

In Part I, Robin Hirsch, our Minister of Culture, recounts a story from the early days of Cornelia Street when Shakespeare made an unexpected appearance in the form of a homeless man curled up in the doorway of the café at seven o'clock in the morning.

In Part II, John Hudson, polymath and Shakespeare scholar, reveals the true identity of the author of the Shakespearean canon, a theory curiously foreshadowed, albeit in a garbled form, by our homeless man in the doorway thirty-five years before.

Robin Hirsch came to the US as a Fulbright Scholar to write about avant-garde American theatre. He is the author of a memoir, Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski, a one-man performance cycle, MOSAIC: Fragments of a Jewish Life, and FEG: Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children, written with the collaboration and interference of his children.

John Hudson also came to the US from the UK, albeit to do corporate strategy for high tech companies. One day he decided to apply his skills to another kind of problem - the meaning and authorship of Shakespeare's plays. He is currently finalizing two books on the subject. He writes:

"Over 400 years researchers have investigated almost every conceivable person as a possible author of Shakespeare's plays . . . And in all those years there was one person who got overlooked . . . It was literally unthinkable to white male Shakespeare scholars that a black, Jewish, feminist, woman poet could have written these plays - even though she was the first woman to publish a book of original poetry, came from a theatrical family deeply involved in the company that performed the plays, and . . . was the mistress to the man in charge of the English theater. Her name is . . . Amelia Bassano Lanier."

The speakers will appear tonight, April 28, 2013 at 6pm at Cornelia St. Café, 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY. Admission: $8 cover includes one drink. Reservations Recommended: 212-989-9319 or www.corneliastreetcafe.com.

Robin Hirsch, Writer and Co-Owner of Cornelia Street Café: ROBIN HIRSCH is a former Oxford, Fulbright, and English-Speaking Union Scholar, who has acted, directed, taught, and published on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was born in London during the Blitz, the son of German Jews who had fled Hitler. This complex history informs much of his work both as a writer and as a performer.

He is the author of Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski: Creating a Life in the Shadow of History (New England Press, 1995; paper, 1996), for which he received two NYFA Fellowships and the 1995-96 Robert and Adele S. Blank Jewish Arts Award, and which Jewish Book News called "one of the best books ever written on the long arm of the Holocaust." He is also the author of FEG:

Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children, written with the collaboration and interference of his children (Little, Brown, 2002), which the New York Times called "searingly smart and intelligent."

He is the founder and artistic director of the New Works Project, an experimental theatre company in New York City, which has developed more than two hundred works for the American theatre, including his own acclaimed solo performance cycle ("completely glorious" according to the Village Voice), Mosaic: Fragments of a Jewish Life, with which he has toured the US and Europe; the first episode, Kinderszenen: Scenes from Childhood was filmed in 2005.

He is co-owner of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, where, since 1977, he has presented work by thousands of artists in every conceivable medium (and quite a few inconceivable ones) from theatre to jazz, from poetry to performance art, from stiltwalking to ventriloquism-from Suzanne Vega to The Vagina Monologues, from Senator Eugene McCarthy to Dr. Oliver Sacks, from members of Monty Python to members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He co-produced (with Bernard Brightman) the award-winning album of original songs on Stash Records, Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange.

He holds a joint Ph.D in Literature and Theatre Arts. His translations, criticism, memoirs, poems, and theatre reviews have been published in Modern International Drama, Culturefront, Forward, the Village Voice, Western Humanities Review, the New York Jewish Review, the New York Times, El Urogallo (Madrid), the Jewish Quarterly (London), etc. He has taught Literature, Theatre, and the Humanities at Universities in Europe and the United States, and toured the US for the National Humanities Series. He has served as a Literature panelist for NYSCA and is a board member of the Writers Room, an urban writers' colony in New York City.