Friday, 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 09:14AMWednesday, September 21, 2011
Alert to Richard Foreman completists: after being out of print for several years, the original cast album of Doctor Selavy’s Magic Theatre, with music by Stanley Silverman and lyrics b…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 02:02PMTuesday, September 20, 2011
A small black tin lockbox holds the secret that ultimately destroys Smitty in In the Zone, another of Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn plays (and which, when accepted for a tour by the…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMSunday, September 18, 2011
Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don’t you see? not the “if I’d done it myself.” Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions but not, n…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:39AMSaturday, September 17, 2011
The last birthday present I received from my father before his death was a DVD of the American Experience biography of Eugene O’Neill that first aired on PBS in 2006. Decades earlier, …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:40AMThursday, September 15, 2011
I will be away from a computer tomorrow so post this regular feature a day early, and to leave the week with a laugh. The below Norwegian television sketch dates from 2001, but it remains a …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:14PMWednesday, September 14, 2011
None dare call it a publicity stunt, but according to the Los Angeles Times, playwrights Neil LaBute and Theresa Rebeck collaborated on a play yesterday, in real time, for the Times‘ &…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:42AMTuesday, September 13, 2011
I’ve had the opportunity to mention both George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) in a few posts here lately, and it is perhaps worth remembering just how much these…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:21PMThe early plays of Eugene O’Neill, as Jeffrey H. Richards points out in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of these plays, are commonly perceived as apprentice works. …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:59AMMonday, September 12, 2011
I have mentioned Randy Gener’s critical work on this blog in the past, and I’m glad to be able to point the way to Mr. Gener’s own Web site, in the theatre of One World, wh…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:06AMSunday, September 11, 2011
For an alternative view on the 9/11 remembrances today, visit Chris Hedges’ dark and disturbing “A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe,” published yesterday at Truthdi…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:10AMFriday, September 9, 2011
It’s properly more of a “Friday audio,” but below you can hear the first half of Theodor Adorno’s Streichquartett from 1921, composed when Adorno was 18, just as he b…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:28AMThursday, September 8, 2011
Paul Cava‘s photo-based collages and montages generate juxtapositions of the forbidden, the natural, the technical, and the human. The layered planes of the collages have a tendency to…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:34AMWednesday, September 7, 2011
The secret of erotic tragedy remains a secret even in the telling, for its import lies in experience, not explication. This secret divides the communal theatrical audience into its individua…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:33AMTuesday, September 6, 2011
I expect you’ll be hearing more from me about Herbert Marcuse’s slim 1978 monograph The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics in the coming weeks. In it, M…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:48AMSunday, September 4, 2011
The first catalog of titles from Contra Mundum Press, “organized to demonstrate that the foundation of thought, and of the freedom and the efficacy of thinking, is not in the mash-up o…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:09AMFriday, September 2, 2011
Though completed in the late 1930s, Brecht’s Life of Galileo was frequently revised through the war years and only received its first production with Brecht’s participation in Lo…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:57AMThursday, September 1, 2011
Superfluities Redux readers rarely leave comments on many of these posts, so I often leave it to Google Reader to pick up any mentions of what I write here. (True, there is the occasional Po…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:24PMWednesday, August 31, 2011
The melancholy that attends the work of the late Expressionists, and especially those of the New Objectivity, is inherent in the work. In Scholz’ self-portrait above, the individual is…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:47AMTuesday, August 30, 2011
A detail of Grünewald’s Crucifixion, the central panel of the Isenheim alterpiece, is the cover image for John Willett’s 1970 survey of Expressionism, published by the World Uni…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 04:26PMRunning from Friday 16 September through Sunday 25 September at the Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets, the Katharsis Performance Project presents Fulya …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:21PMFriday, August 26, 2011
On The New York Times‘ (“We don’t just report it, we are it,” goes the current advertising slogan for the newspaper, which is deserving of a post in itself) “Ar…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:47AMThursday, August 25, 2011
The role of the elegy is to describe a closed system: the closed system of the dead individual, now bereft of possibility and imagination. It is also a dramatic performance in the form of mo…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:17AMFriday, August 19, 2011
Because a few of this week’s posts concerned criticism, I offer at the end of this week two pieces of same. The first is “The Con’s on Mamet,” a lengthy review of Dav…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:29AMThursday, August 18, 2011
In today’s New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes about the restaurant experience as theatre, from the very privileged and expensive perspective of the chef’s table. Now that t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:38AMWednesday, August 17, 2011
Theatre criticism, like theatre production itself, is a time-consuming, money-consuming, and grueling activity, and its rewards are few, especially for those of us who do not do it “fo…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:12AMTuesday, August 16, 2011
Once in a while, it’s worth linking to other online theatre criticism publications, and not only to confirm that the Internet in some ways remains a last bastion of serious long-form d…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:42AMFriday, August 12, 2011
Less than two months after Samuel Beckett’s death on 22 December 1989, Harold Pinter recorded the below memoir of the dramatist under the title “A Wake for Sam.” Pinter sha…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:36AMWednesday, August 10, 2011
Theatre and drama artists, along with the critical press, may be too busy with festivals near and far to respond in their usual manner to a few international crises of the past week (as well…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 03:40PMTuesday, August 9, 2011
Keeping up with latest developments in drama, especially that which challenges the status quo consensus of what drama is and should be, requires a great deal of reading — these plays r…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMMonday, August 8, 2011
Dramatist Erik Ehn is touring Africa as he prepares and completes his play cycle Soulographie: Our Genocides, due to premiere in New York in November 2012. From a 6 August entry in the Soulo…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:07PM 
