John Farrell co-founded Figures of Speech Theatre with dancer/designer and now wife Carol (Llewellyn) Farrell. Since then, they have toured the world with 20 original works of theater and have gained recognition for their groundbreaking work juxtaposing puppets, actors, and other stage media. Farrell has been an artist-in-residence at numerous colleges and arts centers and has studied with the Japanese master puppet builder Toru Saito. In 1999 he was one of five American artists awarded a Creative Artists' Program Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. Maine Arts Commission awarded him an Individual Artist Fellowship in 2002 and he is the 2004 recipient of the New England Theater Conference's award for Outstanding Achievement in the American Theater. 

With rarely granted permission of the T. S. Eliot Estate, John Farrell committed to memory the 886 lines of Four Quartets and now tours internationally with his recitation of Eliot’s epic poem. An unquestioned masterpiece of 20th-century literature, Four Quartets is a complex, deeply moving meditation on time, memory, and human striving toward the divine. Writing at the height of his artistic powers, Eliot packed into Four Quartets a summation of his views on poetry and art, on mystical experience, and on humankind's relationship to history and time. John's recitation of Four Quartets affords audiences an opportunity to immerse themselves in these gorgeous lines of poetry, spoken from memory, and renew their understanding of one of the 20th century's most exceptional poets.

Free event