Monday, July 23, 2012
The 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 09:18AMFriday, July 20, 2012
Along with Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst was the most notable of the directors of the Neue Sachlichkeit period in Weimar film. Establishing himself with The Joyless Street in 1925, Greta Garbo̵…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:27AMThursday, July 19, 2012
German-language culture and art from 1899 (when the first edition of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams appeared in Vienna) through 1933 remains timely. The Central European geographical…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 11:03AMWednesday, July 18, 2012
Once you remove subject matter, plot, and character from a political drama — that is, the explicit politics of it — what is left? In a short text called “Brecht out of fash…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:34AMTuesday, July 17, 2012
On the occasion of the opening of her Sports Play by the Just a Must theatre company now touring England and Wales, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek participated in an in…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:03AMFriday, July 13, 2012
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rou…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:22AMThursday, July 12, 2012
It is necessary, once a writer has made some kind of discovery or experienced some kind of epiphany, to put that discovery and epiphany at arm’s length — to contemplate it and ma…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:44AMWednesday, July 11, 2012
At the recently-resurrected Clyde Fitch Report (now under new management), OccupyTCG controversialist Ian Thal just completed a fascinating two-part analysis of the Israeli theatre Habima…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:33PMOriginally published in July 2010. Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution will be produced by London’s National Theatre later this year; melancholy is central to my own new pla…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:36AMTuesday, July 10, 2012
In a post at his blog Adaptistration today, Drew McManus extends a few notes he offered here yesterday in “The only thing we have to fear is each other.” It is particularly inter…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:17AMMonday, July 9, 2012
It may be worth stepping outside the institutional models for theatre in America to look at the condition of another art, classical music — specifically in its high-culture status as t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:45PMSunday, July 8, 2012
About ten years ago, composer Joshua Fineberg considered the reasons why anyone would write music that might be called “difficult” in an essay called “Classical music: Why …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:39AMSaturday, July 7, 2012
I have been following with some interest Ian Thal’s recent reports from the recent TCG conference in Boston (Part I is here, Part II here, with a Part III promised at some point), and …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:57AMFriday, July 6, 2012
In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the words “playwright” and “dramatist” had not yet been coined. Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare were known by the designatio…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:44AMThursday, July 5, 2012
Yesterday I went through my first version of the Erlkönig play which I started last year under the title of The Elf King; of the 30 pages I completed then, perhaps two of them will end up i…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:40AMTuesday, July 3, 2012
The publication of the Cambridge University Press edition of Schopenhauer’s works continues in October with the release of On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings.…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:45AMMonday, July 2, 2012
How to endure under the burden of acknowledged despair: when that which was to raise him over the limits of the earth drowns him in the sea instead (a comic twist and reversal), when the onl…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 02:16PMThe decision to embrace an aesthetic of asceticism, of essentialism, of restraint is essentially a moral decision, a decision easier to make for those who already have an affinity with it, w…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:09AMFriday, June 29, 2012
I finally tracked down the Beckett conversation to which I referred earlier this week; it is reported in Anthony Cronin’s biography Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996). In the la…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMThursday, June 28, 2012
Those of us on the Lower East Side of New York for whom “the late Michael Jackson” will always refer to a Beer Hunter and never a Gloved One are enjoying Top Hops, a small beer e…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:54AMWednesday, June 27, 2012
Simon Critchley‘s Very Little … Almost Nothing attempts a response to a stylish nihilism in which much of 21st century culture seems mired. He traverses a philosophical path sign…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:04AMMonday, June 25, 2012
Every dramatist must decide for whom he is writing his plays, and I’ve decided that I’m writing my plays for my wife, my children, and myself, and no others. This is a conception…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:06AMFriday, June 22, 2012
Krzysztof Penderecki‘s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1959) was composed for 52 string instruments. At first it seemed to the composer a mere experiment in form, counterpoint, a…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:34AMThursday, June 21, 2012
Philosophy is an art of touching, just as sex is an art of intelligence. Touch is the living experience of the world on the part of what “thinks thought” in us. Philosophy is an …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:45AMWednesday, June 20, 2012
Richard Foreman is asking for your help. Though Foreman’s new play Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) is due to open at the Public Theater next year, his Ontological-Hysteric T…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 11:18AMIn the late 1500s, when the Elizabethan theatre was just coming of age, there were few structures in London purpose-built for theatrical presentation, and very few, if any, in the provinces …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:48AMTuesday, June 19, 2012
On those rare occasions when Marilyn and I find ourselves free of the children on a weekday evening, we’re lucky enough to have a wide choice of restaurants on the Lower East Side, but…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:04AMMonday, June 18, 2012
Poking around on the American Theatre Critics Association Web site the other day, I came across Harold Clurman’s 1964 list of what an anonymous annotator called “12 commandments&…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:04AMFriday, June 15, 2012
The snickers were all over the Facebook and Twitter feeds of theatre critics yesterday after they came across a press release from the production company of Strut & Fret. In what appears…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:44AMNot long ago I wrote about the figure of the salesman in American drama — it wasn’t a complete list, of course; among others I left out The Music Man‘s Prof. Harold Hill. F…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:52AMThursday, June 14, 2012
Howard Sherman considers — then rejects — the idea of a US national theatre, not least because we already have one, he says. “Despite protestations to the contrary, America…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:17AM 
