Monday, 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 01:07PMThe extent to which Schopenhauer might be considered the progenitor of modern tragedy can be found in his statement, “The only thing essential to tragedy is the portrayal of a great mi…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:48AMSaturday, August 6, 2011
Tragedy should be viewed, and is in fact recognized, as the pinnacle of literature, both in relation to the grandeur of its effect and the difficulty of achieving it. It is of great signific…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:20AMLet us transport ourselves to a very solitary region with a boundless horizon under a completely cloudless sky, with trees and plants in completely still air, no animals, no people, no movin…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:09AMFriday, August 5, 2011
§ 1 The distinction between eroticism and pornography in the tragedy is as significant as the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. As an object of contemplation, the tragedy d…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:27AMThursday, August 4, 2011
No individual’s handwriting quite resembles any other. In critical literature studies, manuscript examination is an attempt to follow a work from its ultimate appearance in print back …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMWednesday, August 3, 2011
After posting “Looking back, looking ahead” yesterday, I found that Slate was having a Joseph Heller day of its own. Yesterday they posted Walter Kirn’s long think piece on…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:51AMTuesday, August 2, 2011
Where are the Hellers and Gaddises of yesteryear? The fiftieth anniversary of the 1961 publication of Catch-22 has crept up on us, marked by the publication of the first major biography of t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:04AMFriday, July 22, 2011
In 2009, the BBC’s Arena series presented a two-part documentary about Harold Pinter, directed by Nigel Williams. The first part of the documentary, The Room, is below, and features …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:21AMThursday, July 21, 2011
The reviews are in for the PTP/NYC production of Howard Barker’s Victory: Choices in Reaction that runs through the end of July, and for a change most reviewers seem to agree with me. …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:20AMTuesday, July 19, 2011
The injustice committed by all cheerful art, especially by entertainment, is probably an injustice to the dead; to accumulated, speechless pain. Still, black art bears features that would, i…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:33AMMonday, July 18, 2011
A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” which I described in connection with my critique of…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:05AMFriday, July 15, 2011
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Booth called the conclusion of King Lear the “most terrifying five minutes of literature.” Below, the final scene of the play, from the 1983 televisio…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:27AMWednesday, July 13, 2011
In contradiction to many of my colleagues, I have been ambivalent about the plays of Tony Kushner since I saw the Broadway production of Perestroika (the second half of Angels in America) in…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:07PMVictory: Choices in Reaction by Howard Barker. A PTP/NYC production directed by Richard Romagnoli. Scenic design: Hallie Zieselman. Lighting design: Mark Evancho. Costume design: Carlie Craw…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:15AMFriday, July 8, 2011
Rarely rescreened, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg‘s seven-hour Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) remains one of the great masterpieces of the form. Below, a ten-minute video essay on the film…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:33AMThursday, July 7, 2011
I wrote the below essay for the original Superfluities journal in May 2006, just before I began to write the material contained in Word Made Flesh. At the time I gave it the title “The…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:25AMWednesday, July 6, 2011
Victory: Choices in Reaction will receive its United States premiere next Tuesday, 12 July, as part of the PTP/NYC summer season at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street in New York. The pl…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:21AMTuesday, July 5, 2011
Comparing his own work to that of his mentor, Samuel Beckett said, “Joyce is a putter-inner, and I’m a taker-outer.” For Beckett, art was contractive, not expansive: a delv…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:50AMFriday, July 1, 2011
In the YouTube clip below, Glenn Gould performs Anton Webern’s 1936 Variations for Piano (Op. 27), the only solo piano composition to which Webern assigned an opus number. The Wikipedi…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:19AMThursday, June 30, 2011
Just a reminder that a full index of Superfluities Redux posts since December 2006, listed alphabetically by category, is available here. Happy reading.
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:14AMWednesday, June 29, 2011
“What do they know of theatre who only theatre know?” goes Aleks Sierz’ cautionary exhortation at his Pirate Dog journal, and it is an interesting question, especially from…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:27AMTuesday, June 28, 2011
On a bright note today, Chris Wilkinson (also known as “Christopher Haydon” in his professional theatrical work), who contributes the weekly “Noises Off” column to th…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 11:02AMAt the New York Review of Books online journal for 11 June, James Fenton discusses religion, audience reaction, the prejudices of the Mormon church and blindness in “The Book of Mormon…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:36AMMonday, June 27, 2011
At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes: Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:22AMMonday, December 17, 2007
Theatre, as an art form, is not as deeply embedded in the history of America's modern culture as it is in Europe's Continue reading...
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:30AM 
