Friday, January 31, 2014
Nancy Kwan was the first. The first movie star my brother and I fell in love with. We met her late at night in the black-and-white universe of our television set. We saw her, initially, in h…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, January 20, 2014
8220;Machinal” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines) is hard to get a handle on and often hard to handle, because it’s a flop and a hit. The hit par…
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In 1987, while working as an assistant in the Village Voice’s art department, I came across a strikingly laid-out book. It had photographs of unknown black people mixed in with photogr…
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When you run a not-for-profit space devoted to the performing arts, personal attractiveness helps. But it’s a tricky thing to handle. You want to be a star in order to attract other st…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, December 16, 2013
Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive” (an Atlantic Theatre Company production at the Linda Gross, directed by the playwright) is about poverty, economic and otherwise. ItR…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, December 9, 2013
My first brush with existentialism came not through my college-era reading list—Kierkegaard, Kafka—but when I first heard Burt Bacharach. This was in the old country of childhood…
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The most significant incarnation of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play “Waiting for Godot” I’ve ever seen was staged outdoors, in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The ye…
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As long ago as the nineteen-nineties, a group of young performers—Sarah Jessica Parker, Billy Crudup, and Ethan Hawke among them—entertained audiences with a new style of acting.…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 18, 2013
From Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay “Joy”: “If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 4, 2013
Harold Pinter’s artistic vision focussed less on love than on the con. Born in 1930, Pinter grew up Jewish in modest circumstances in London’s East End, the beloved only child of…
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Period detail and a magnetic turn by Jeffrey Wright elevate the current season of “Boardwalk Empire.”
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:17PMMonday, October 21, 2013
Marie Antoinette continues to interest us because punishment does. Born in Vienna in 1755 and executed in Paris thirty-seven years later, she has never had what one might call a dramatically…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, October 18, 2013
In a series of interviews conducted with the British-born playwright Harold Pinter in 1971, Mel Gussow said that he was struck by the emotion and lyricism in some of the author’s post-…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, October 11, 2013
The notion that theatre is universal is specious, given the world of difference that can separate the productions in New York’s uptown and downtown theatres. In the nineteen-fifties, O…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 30, 2013
Writers, for the most part, find themselves not in writing but in revision. The “I” of personal narrative—the egotism it takes to display one’s point of view in a nov…
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What happens when you pimp out the pop in a pop masterpiece? Does it cheapen the original work by association? An unfortunate aspect of the thirty or so modern-day screen adaptations of R…
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When you think about the talented children of famous parents, you don’t necessarily think about their gifts so much as their genes. Could the famous offspring’s renown be based o…
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You know Lois Smith. You’ve seen her a million times. Onstage, in the movies, on TV. You might be thinking of Mary Louise Wilson or Elizabeth Wilson—two equally great actresses, …
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In the waning days of summer, when it’s still too warm to think about fall but it’s there, in the night air, I’ve been reading Richard Sewall’s essential 1974 book, &…
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The show is a crowd-pleaser, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why: most audiences are reacting to its charming narrative surface. But there’s more going on than that.
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Wallace Shawn’s primary impulse in his dramatic work is to fuck with the audience. Not through content—though he messes with that, too—but through form, which more or less …
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Days before Tennessee Williams’s 1967 chamber piece “The Two-Character Play” opened at New World Stages, I began to experience a certain apprehension. I think my anxiety wa…
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8220;Far from Heaven” (at Playwrights Horizons) is a problem musical, a genteel contrivance wrapped in “issues”—racism, homophobia, misogyny—that limit the show…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWriting in this magazine in 1970, Kennedy Fraser brilliantly described a boutique that was then gaining in popularity at Bendel’s. Called Stephen Burrows’ World, it was a univers…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, May 27, 2013
Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the t…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, May 6, 2013
8220;Made Here” is an online documentary series now in its third season. (The entire series can be viewed at madehereproject.org.) In it, we meet a variety of performing artists living…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 29, 2013
Once again, the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca’s considerable influence is being talked about, debated, celebrated. In addition to publishing his legendary plays—s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM8220;The Testament of Mary” (directed by Deborah Warner, at the Walter Kerr) is theatre porn. Stiff with its own seriousness, it’s a Broadway show that wants to impress us with i…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 22, 2013
Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Nance” (at the Lyceum) is a nearly perfect work of dramatic art, whose power derives from its equitable compassion and its unromantic view of my…
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My reservations about each show were minimized by four outstanding actors: Billy Porter in “Kinky Boots,” and De’Adre Aziza, Brandon J. Dirden, and Samantha Soule in the pl…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:30PMMonday, April 1, 2013
Elaine Stritch has a new documentary coming out, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which will première at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19. That’s the happy news. What …
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