“Hannah Arendt Quits Smoking” – A Staged Reading of a New Play by the Kansas Collective
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
5:30 pm – 7:30 pm
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Hannah Arendt loves smoking. It is part of her intellectual process. The image of her constantly with a cigarette in hand is iconic. It is interwoven into the very idea of the European expatriate thinker in the United States after WWII. And she wants to quit. Now. So on the advice of her friend, the famed novelist Mary McCarthy, Arendt arrives at a fashionable therapist’s office on a rainy day in 1970s New York. In “Hannah Arendt Quits Smoking,” we meet the famed political theorist at a moment of atypical and somewhat uncomfortably American self-improvement. Cigarettes straddle the old world and the new, complicating European and German Jewish identity in the face of American assimilation. But will she be successful? Can Hannah Arendt ultimately quit smoking? Taking its lead from the recent revival of Arendt on both the academic stage as well as her inescapable presence in all discussions on totalitarianism, “Hannah Arendt Quits Smoking” captures the daily challenges of the philosopher’s life – full of surprises and truth, and a journey that comes full circle by giving up those addictions we most love.
Hannah Arendt loves smoking. It is part of her intellectual process. The image of her constantly with a cigarette in hand is iconic. It is interwoven into the very idea of the European expatriate thinker in the United States after WWII. And she wants to quit. Now. So on the advice of her friend, the famed novelist Mary McCarthy, Arendt arrives at a fashionable therapist’s office on a rainy day in 1970s New York. In “Hannah Arendt Quits Smoking,” we meet the famed political theorist at a moment of atypical and somewhat uncomfortably American self-improvement. Cigarettes straddle the old world and the new, complicating European and German Jewish identity in the face of American assimilation. But will she be successful? Can Hannah Arendt ultimately quit smoking? Taking its lead from the recent revival of Arendt on both the academic stage as well as her inescapable presence in all discussions on totalitarianism, “Hannah Arendt Quits Smoking” captures the daily challenges of the philosopher’s life – full of surprises and truth, and a journey that comes full circle by giving up those addictions we most love.