History Theatre’s adaptation of Tim O’Brien’s award-winning novel will be presented at Riverland Community College’s Frank W. Bridges Theatre on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m. The Things They Carried by Worthington native Tim O’Brien is considered by many to be the quintessential book about the experience of American soldiers during and after the Vietnam War. Stephen D’Ambrose, directed by Leah Cooper, performs the novel adapted for the stage by Minnesota storyteller Jim Stowell as a one-man show.

This stage adaptation of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried developed at History Theatre premiered in March 2014, receiving accolades from audiences and reviewers, educators and students. The production will tour to seven venues, including Riverland, throughout Minnesota during November 2014.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

PERFORMANCES:           Thursday, November 6 at 7:30 pm TICKET PRICES:              $10 general public; current Riverland students receive two free tickets VENUE:                            Frank W. Bridges Theatre, 1900 8^th Ave NW, Austin, MN 55912 BOX OFFICE:                   507-433-0595 or purchase tickets online at www.riverland.edu/tickets Content warning: This show includes descriptions of violent events. It is recommended for ages 16 and up.

About the Artists

TIM O’BRIEN, Author – the THINGS THEY CARRIED

Tim O’Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota and spent his childhood in Worthington, Minn. He was drafted for military service in 1968, two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree in Government and Politics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He served a 13-month tour as a regular foot soldier and radio telephone operator. He was wounded twice while in service, and ultimately rose to the rank of Sergeant.

After returning from his tour in March 1970, he resumed his schooling and began graduate work in government and political science at Harvard University. After Harvard, he went to work briefly for The Washington Post as a national affairs reporter before his attention was fully devoted to writing. He began and continues to publish regularly in various periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, and Playboy, frequently excerpting parts of his novels as autonomous short stories.

O’Brien’s first published work was a war memoir and account of his year as a “grunt” in Vietnam, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). He followed up his autobiographical account with a debut novel entitled Northern Lights (1975). Going After Cacciato (1978) brought O’Brien to wider public acclaim and earned him the 1979 National Book Award in fiction.

In 1987 O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” the first vignette in the later novel of the same name, was first published in Esquire, and it received the 1987 National Magazine Award in Fiction. The short story was also selected for the 1987 “Best American Short Stories” volume and for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories of the 1980s.

O’Brien published The Things They Carried in 1990 and it won the 1990 Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction. The novel was selected by The New York Times as one of the year’s ten best novels and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1991, O’Brien was awarded the Melcher Award for The Things They Carried and won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in 1992.

The follow-up novel, In the Lake of the Woods, published in 1994, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as the best novel of 1994 by Time magazine.

O’Brien has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation, the National Book Award, James Fenimore Cooper Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Most recently, he was awarded the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award in June of 2013. He has been elected to both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

O’Brien currently holds the University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. He lives with his wife and children in Austin, Texas.

Jim Stowell, Playwright – THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

Jim is a co-founder of the Minnesota Ensemble Theater and the Palace Theater. He has written and directed eleven full-cast plays and written and performed eleven one-man plays. At History Theatre Jim has performed his one-man shows Cuba Si, Joe, and Three Rivers Meeting. His work has been performed at the Guthrie, and in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, the back room of a bar, a barn, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Brazil. In 2011 he was a Featured Teller at The National Storytelling Festival. Jim has spent the last eleven summers living on an island, in a lighthouse, working as a Park Ranger for the National Park Service.