Sunday, November 6, 2011
And then of course there are still commonplace entries in the Elf King notebook of good old text. Below two excerpts from Beckett, particularly germane to the circumstances of the play: Oh I…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:55PMFriday, November 4, 2011
One of the structural and estranging devices that I’m using in The Elf King is the form of the vaudeville show — not dissimilar to the way it was used in the Peter Nichols’…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:19AMThursday, November 3, 2011
When I began to write plays in the 1970s, I used to keep random thoughts and notes about plays both planned and underway in a spiral-bound notebook. At that time, I found most of my creative…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:55AMWednesday, November 2, 2011
While I’m writing the new play I’m thinking quite seriously about how it relates to my criticism and theory and again whether or not it is possible in the professional sphere of …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:03AMTuesday, November 1, 2011
At his own new Web site, Aleks Sierz, whose book Rewriting the Nation I discussed in March here, brings us up to date on plays from the last few years of new British writing for the theatre.…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:55AMSunday, October 30, 2011
Ruby Cohn, whose Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962) established her as the foremost first-generation Beckett critic and introduced Beckett’s work to a huge general audience, passed…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:57AMMonday, October 24, 2011
Three years ago on this date my father died; in his memory I repost below a meditation on this written in August of last year and which appears as the final chapter of Word Made Flesh under …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:17AMFriday, October 21, 2011
Having a few hours to spare at the Baltimore AMTRAK station yesterday, I made several pages of notes about a new play, very loosely inspired by this rather beautiful essay by Emily Rapp in�…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:41AMWednesday, October 19, 2011
Opening on Sunday 13 November, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne are bringing their C.I.C.T./Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord production of Fragments, from five of Samuel Beckett’s …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 11:37AMTuesday, October 18, 2011
More than a fifth of Superfluities Redux‘ readers come from the United Kingdom; this post is to alert them that the new London revival of Edward Bond’s Saved, which I mentioned l…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:18PMMonday, October 17, 2011
On 30 October 1947, Bertolt Brecht appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in response to a subpoena; his testimony is controversial for a number of reasons. Many commenta…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:42AMSunday, October 16, 2011
Now that I’ve completed my list of eight dramatists for a new Theatre of Revolt, the only thing left is to acknowledge once again that this is a list compiled, like Robert BrusteinR…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:30AMOnly time will tell whether the extraordinarily small number of plays by Sarah Kane (1971-1999) will have as great an influence on drama as those of Georg Büchner. Certainly their influence…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:47AMIt will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that Howard Barker (b. 1946) is the seventh of the eight dramatists that I am writing about as exemplars of a new Theatre of Revol…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:46AMFriday, October 14, 2011
One of the revolutions theorized in a new Theatre of Revolt must be a revolution not only in society or politics, but also in the realm of consciousness: in the perspective from which one se…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:40AMWednesday, October 12, 2011
Harold Pinter (1930-2008) might be said to have domesticated Samuel Beckett‘s more metaphysical concerns by moving them from an abstract setting into the sitting- and living-rooms of h…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:45AMTuesday, October 11, 2011
Tomorrow night, Wednesday 12 October at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken, whom the New York Times has called “a determined protector of important music” and “one of the greatest inte…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:37AMMonday, October 10, 2011
In yesterday’s Guardian, Maddy Costa discusses Edward Bond’s Saved, the controversial classic that is now receiving its first professional London revival in three decades at the …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:14PMFriday, October 7, 2011
I’m halfway through my list of my personal nominees for a new Theatre of Revolt — Brecht, Beckett, Albee and Müller so far — and, time permitting, next week will bring the…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:26AMWednesday, October 5, 2011
Perhaps, for the most revolutionary dramatists, their followers take to the streets on occasion. The funeral cortege of German dramatist Heiner Müller (1929-1995) was “an impromptu pr…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:59PMEven the gentlest, most tentative outreach from one individual to another may eventually exhibit violence, hatred, and despair. This insight forms a wide significant stream in the plays of E…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:21AMTuesday, October 4, 2011
A few posts on the art and business of playwriting have come my way. First, there’s Terry Teachout’s rather mournful but still hopeful “The Playwright’s Reward”…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:02PMAs with Brecht’s plays, every dramatist writing after 1945 must contend with the plays of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). For both the American and European theatre, Beckett and Brecht …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:36AMMonday, October 3, 2011
The only playwright that my list of revolutionary dramatists shares with Robert Brustein’s is Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Though Brecht only lived for a decade after the end of the Sec…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:50AMSunday, October 2, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street protestors have now issued a laundry list of grievances and demands (this just before 700 of them were arrested trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge by foot yesterday, …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:27AMFriday, September 30, 2011
Tomorrow marks the eighth anniversary of Superfluities Redux, and this year the theatrical blogosphere crossed a Rubicon of sorts with the completion of the first (to my knowledge) master…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:58AMThursday, September 29, 2011
Dreamless Land, written and directed by Julia Jarcho, will be the next offering from Richard Maxwell’s company the New York City Players, opening at the Abrons Arts Center on 4 Novembe…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:31AMWednesday, September 28, 2011
Jonathan Kalb’s new book from the University of Michigan Press, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, looks at seven contemporary theatrical works that test the extremes of d…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:42AMMonday, September 26, 2011
One stream of contemporary erotic tragedy must look to the urbanized Neue Sachlichkeit movement of Weimar Germany: there it will find considerable historic and aesthetic inspiration. The con…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:19PMI had a rare few spare minutes on Saturday and stopped in briefly at “Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life,” the new exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery which runs t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:46AMFriday, September 23, 2011
First, turnabout is fair play: Neil LaBute responds (in part) to my post “Work Made for Hire” at the Guardian theatre blog, where Andrew Haydon included it in his weekly “N…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:14AM 
