<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:12px"><div class="" align="center" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in;text-align:center" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12193"><b class="" style="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12196"><i class="" style="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12195"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12194"> WordStage Literary Concerts presents - The Epic of Gilgamesh </span></i></b></div><div class="" align="center" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in;text-align:center" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12193"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12192">Thursday, April 23rd at
7:00 pm at The Lakewood Public Library’s Main Branch Auditorium – 15425 Detroit
Avenue. Lakewood, OH. The Performance is FREE and Open to the Public<o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12237"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12236">Love, Sex, Murder,
Jealousy, Heroism, Vanity, Lust, all that and more can be found in the first
great masterpiece of world literature, <i class="" style="">The Epic of Gilgamesh</i>. This sweeping saga recounts the adventures of
a legendary king and is based in all likelihood on an actual historical figure,
Gilgamesh, the ruler of the Babylonian city of Uruk around 2700 B.C. Credited
with erecting the massive wall around Uruk, the first major city, Gilgamesh
emerged over the centuries as the hero of a cycle of poems, and eventually of
the 3,000-line epic, which reached final form around 1200 B.C. <o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12239"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12238">Like all ancient
Mesopotamian literature, the epic of Gilgamesh was lost to historical memory
with the eclipse of the ancient cultures of Assyria and Babylonia in the
centuries before Christ. Only in the mid-19th century did British and French
archaeologists begin to explore the mysterious mounds in present-day Iraq that
held the remains of the first urban societies. A particularly rich find was the
library of Ashurbanipal, last great king of Assyria. In the 1850s, British archaeologist Austin
Henry Layard and his Iraqi associate, Hormuzd Rassam, unearthed it in the ruins
of Nineveh. <o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="">They shipped 100,000
tablets and fragments home to the British Museum, and, gradually, scholars
began to piece them together and decipher the ancient texts.<o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12150"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12149" class="">In 1872, the young
curator George Smith created a sensation when he unearthed Gilgamesh's broken
tablets in the museum's collection. Smith immediately perceived that the
character of Uta-napishtim, Gilgamesh's ancestor, constituted an early version
of the Bible's Noah—a striking parallel at a time when Victorian debates over
religion and science were at their height.<o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="">The text has been
adapted from a contemporary translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh by Stephen
Mitchell, and a dramatic verse play setting of the legend by poet Yusef
Komunyakaa and Dramaturge Chad Gracia.<o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="">This performance,
commissioned by the Lakewood Public Library for its 2015 National Poetry Month
Celebration, will feature actors Michael Mauldin, Dan Kilbane, Agnes Herrmann,
Paul Slimak, Marci Paolucci, and WordStage Artistic Director, Tim Tavcar. An original and multi-layered soundscape to
accompany the reading will be created and performed by master percussionist –
Paul Stranahan.<o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div class="" style="margin-top:.25in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.25in;margin-left:0in"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="">For more information,
please visit the WordStage web site at </span><a href="http://www.wordstageoh.com/" class="" style=""><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"" class="">www.wordstageoh.com</span></a><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="">, or call us at 216-712-6926. Or visit the
Lakewood Library’s web site at </span><a href="http://www.lkwdpl.org/" class="" style=""><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"" class="">www.lkwdpl.org</span></a><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" class="">, or call them at 216-226-8275.<o:p class="" style=""></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1429296641158_12118">
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