Monday, September 10, 2012
Due for availability later this month, my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken‘s new CD from Métier, Voix Voilées, is an informal sequel to her best-selling double-CD set of Tristan MurailR…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:54AMFriday, September 7, 2012
Some New Yorkers will gather around their Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section this weekend to tick off items in the new season preview of upcoming theatre productions, a somewha…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:57AMThursday, September 6, 2012
We have New York critics as librettists and playwrights these days, a laudable crossover to be sure. But what if critics and reviewers were actually to run a theatre? To be responsible for t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:23AMWednesday, September 5, 2012
Culturebot comes at art and criticism from the world of dance and performance rather than traditional literary dramaturgy, but its editor Andy Horwitz gathers together some more general thou…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:55AMTuesday, September 4, 2012
Over the holiday weekend I posted a few items; those of you who were at the beach or taking a well-deserved vacation from the digital world may have missed them. On Saturday I published a re…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:45AMMonday, September 3, 2012
Text: Eugene O’Neill, Early Plays, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards; New York: Penguin Books, 2001, pp. 265-292. Race, power, greed, and empire are the central themes of Eugene O’Neill&…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:41PMSaturday, September 1, 2012
The big tent of great American plays is broad enough to contain works of both tragic and comic sensibilities: The Iceman Cometh, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman among the f…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 02:00PMFriday, August 31, 2012
I’ve known — and liked — Terry Teachout for a number of years now, though I haven’t seen the man in some time, and despite our vastly differing tastes and backgrounds…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMThursday, August 30, 2012
A few blogospheric notes to round out the summer: Guardian critic Lyn Gardner is taking over the reins of that newspaper’s theatre blog as her “permanent home,” Andrew Dick…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:47AMWednesday, August 29, 2012
On August 9, 2010, I published a few notes about and by playwright John Whiting; they remain of interest to several readers, my statistics indicate, and so I repost them below. I also take t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:53AMTuesday, August 28, 2012
I regularly write here about Samuel Beckett and Arthur Schopenhauer, but not only to air my own perspective. It is my hope that my readers themselves will also be drawn to seek out their wri…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:18AMMonday, August 27, 2012
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? [1] The body suffers fear and terror even without the cognition of the threat of an approaching dark — it knows suffe…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:13PMSunday, August 12, 2012
Superfluities Redux will be on hiatus at least through the rest of the summer season.
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:11AMFriday, August 10, 2012
I first saw Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories on the day of its premiere, 26 September 1980, at the now-defunct Baronet theatre on the Upper East Side, alone. I no longer think as I did …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:37AMThursday, August 9, 2012
In facing the children, Christ in Emil Nolde‘s 1910 painting is turned away from us. He is also faced away from the figures at the left; the title of the painting encourages us to gues…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:41AMWednesday, August 8, 2012
The pensum is laid upon us at the moment of our birth — the reason for this pensum, if there is a reason, is beyond our understanding. It is therefore not a question of guilt or innoce…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:25AMTuesday, August 7, 2012
The writer writes in the wake of the epiphany: then it becomes all craft, somehow to embody the content of the realization which resists description. There it is, all failure, and caught fir…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:54AMMonday, August 6, 2012
A few years ago, it was my pleasure to meet and briefly talk with Martin E. Segal, who established the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2000. Mr. Segal was a gen…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:53PMSounding Beckett, a program that combines three late Beckett plays with new works by contemporary composers, will open at the Classic Stage Company on 14 September 2012 and run through 23 Se…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:39AMFriday, August 3, 2012
On 29 June I presented a YouTube version of Samuel Beckett’s 1982 television play Nacht und Träume, and in apologizing for its poor quality I recommended that “some enterprising…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:33AMWednesday, August 1, 2012
In a 1997 interview, Wallace Shawn said of the New York response to his work: It’s just that I have done plays in America for many years — and this is not to pass a judgment — but I’…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:07AMTuesday, July 31, 2012
In the better-late-than-never department, word comes today through the Theatre for a New Audience Web site that Wallace Shawn’s 2009 play Grasses of a Thousand Colors will make its US …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:57PMTo come back to the theater, good new texts, recognizable as plays in any definition, made up of words (dialogue) to one major degree or another, go on being written and watched, even —…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:24AMMonday, July 30, 2012
In her new Jumper post published just this morning, “Are we a sector defined by our permanently failing organizations?” Diane Ragsdale considers the internal dynamics of institut…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:50PMAbout a year ago I published the below notes on theatre and revolution; I take this opportunity as well to recommend the new edition of Georg Büchner’s work from W.W. Norton, publishe…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:36AMFriday, July 27, 2012
The theme of this week’s entries, it has emerged, has been my re-acquaintance with H.L. Mencken after many years. Somewhere in the deeper recesses of my personal archive there lies a c…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:51AMThursday, July 26, 2012
The Supreme Being has been taking a lot of lumps this week. Although CNN already has its own wrathful Old Testament dispenser of judgment and retribution, its religion editor Dan Gilgoff non…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:16AMWednesday, July 25, 2012
On 29 June I had the pleasure, through the generosity of acquaintances, to visit the Park Avenue Armory for Philharmonic 360 and rare performances of Pierre Boulez’ Rituel in Memoriam …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:38AMTuesday, July 24, 2012
H.L. Mencken cut his satirical teeth on drama and theatre, as the excellent new anthology, The Collected Drama of H.L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism, edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Sca…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:21AMMonday, July 23, 2012
The critic/dramatist dichotomy continues to break down in small ways; Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf, directed by Gordon Edelstein, opens at the Lon…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 04:16PMThe National Theatre’s production of Scenes from an Execution with Fiona Shaw opens on 27 September; in 2008 I reviewed the Potomac Theatre Company production with Jan Maxwell here in …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:18AM 
