Thursday, February 2, 2012
Before I retire to matters extra-theatrical and non-dramatic, a little unfinished business to be completed. I note the new publication of The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Play…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:07AMTuesday, January 31, 2012
In Act One of Tristan und Isolde, both characters drink deep from a chalice which they believe contains poison; instead, it is a love potion. Only a superficial consideration would conclude …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:14PMWhere philosophy ends, art begins. In a sense, after Schopenhauer’s “Nothing,” the word which concludes The World as Will and Representation, there is the emergence of the …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:21AMFriday, January 27, 2012
In the below excerpt from the 1984 BBC series Sea of Faith, presenter Don Cupitt discusses the role of Eastern religion in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought and quotes from the conclusion …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:53AMWednesday, January 25, 2012
With the official republication of William Gaddis‘ The Recognitions and J R next month by the Dalkey Archive Press (available now at amazon.com), all of the novelist’s books are …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:11AMTuesday, January 24, 2012
dragging his hunger through the sky of my skull shell of sky and earth stooping to the prone who must soon take up their life and walk mocked by a tissue that may not serve till hunger earth…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:00AMMonday, January 23, 2012
The bitterness of Tay-Sachs disease and similar syndromes lies in its distillation of human existence. An infant with these syndromes is born quite normally and enters the world to recognize…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:51AMSaturday, January 21, 2012
“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.” Bearing the humbling injunction from Arthur Schopenhauer above in mind, I recently att…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:12AMFriday, January 20, 2012
My Houston readers (and there are a few) will want to hear about Da Camera of Houston’s Gyorgy Kurtág: A Composed Program, to be performed by the new music duo Sarah Rothenberg and Ma…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:43AMWednesday, January 18, 2012
Howard Barker’s Blok/Eko, produced last summer by the Wrestling School at the Exeter Northcott Theatre and directed by the author, “is a large-scale drama about death and its sta…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:34AMTuesday, January 17, 2012
Available shortly will be the initial publication of Contra Mundum Press, Stuart Kendall’s new translation of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic poem. According to the press release: The…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:04PMMonday, January 16, 2012
I’d very much like to thank those who braved the 25-degree temperature to join Margo Jefferson, Tom Sellar, Randy Gener, Andy Horwitz, and myself for the panel discussion on criticism …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:55AMFriday, January 13, 2012
I have been reading about a recent event that took place in Afghanistan — wondering why it hasn’t raised the same outrage in the U.S. as the Abu Ghraib photographs of a few years…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:53AMWednesday, January 11, 2012
The final entry I’ll post in anticipation of this Sunday’s Culturebot conversation on citizen criticism at the Public Theater is the below essay from August 2009. It arose as a r…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:45PMThe theatre was necessarily desexualized (Beckett) before it could be resexualized again (Barker). … The thing-in-itself is as unknowable in the theatre as it is unknowable in the phen…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:18AMTuesday, January 10, 2012
Talk about your long-form criticism: Today I repost below a 2007 two-hour panel discussion on criticism (funny how these things proliferate; my own conclusion is that the number of these pan…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:18AMMonday, January 9, 2012
There’s been little media notice of the Nathan award to Jill Dolan this year, and in ordinary years this might be explicable: it’s certainly the kind of inside-baseball thing amo…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:57PMErnst Ferdinand Oehme (German, 1797–1855). Meissen in Winter, 1854.
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:24AMFriday, January 6, 2012
A sign of the times: one of the first things that film critic J. Hoberman did when he was laid off from the Village Voice earlier this week was to start a blog. Hoberman was one of those cri…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:17AMThursday, January 5, 2012
I know there are those who are wondering if Superfluities Redux will ever get back to regular business; in truth I rarely write about the state of criticism and write more about erotic trage…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:00AMTuesday, January 3, 2012
Welcome antidotes to the end-of-year/beginning-of-year top-ten lists and eyes-raised-to-the-future optimism come from two recognized critics over the past few weeks. First, in his own person…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:38PMOn Sunday 15 January at 1.00pm, I will be participating in a rather excellent-sounding conversation at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, “Everyone’s A Critic! Expl…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:37AMMonday, January 2, 2012
One of the issues that will certainly arise at the upcoming Culturebot conversation at Under the Radar will be that of authority — specifically, where and how authority, power, and inf…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:20AMFriday, December 30, 2011
Two years ago, at the end of 2009, I posted a brief essay about the TDF/New Dramatists study of new American plays and the development process leading to them, Outrageous Fortune. I repost i…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:16AMThursday, December 29, 2011
In an early note for my play The Elf King I wrote, “Ritualistic remembrance may be the overarching form of the play” and “This play is not about hope. It is about how to li…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:36AMSaturday, December 24, 2011
I’d like to wish regular readers of Superfluities Redux a very happy 2012, and offer them my thanks for continuing to visit the site through 2011. I will take a brief pause before resu…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:16AMFriday, December 23, 2011
For those who still believe that the theatrical blogosphere rings the death knell for serious drama criticism in America, here’s something to put that fear to rest: The George Jean Nat…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:30PMSunday, December 18, 2011
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:07AMFriday, December 16, 2011
In the below excerpt, the Romanian/French playwright Eugene Ionesco discusses his childhood, his early experiences at the theatre, his own particular sense of the absurd, and the close relat…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:19AMThursday, December 15, 2011
The Guardian recently launched a welcome series called “Michael Billington’s A to Z of modern drama” with Billington’s comments on Martin Esslin’s 1961 book The…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:07AMWednesday, December 14, 2011
A few upcoming events to consider for your calendar: Next Monday, 19 December, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center offers an all-day symposium called “The Legacy of Reza Abdoh,” t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:42AM 
