Thursday, January 17, 2013
Time, space, and money being finite quantities in this world, the books that a person chooses to surround oneself with become a fascinating glimpse into the life of that mind. Far more than …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:37AMWednesday, January 16, 2013
For the past several years, Howard Barker has been continuing his sojourn into the uncharted waters of theatre through a project he has identified as “Plethora and bare sufficiency,…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:28AMTuesday, January 15, 2013
The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht. Written 1938-41; premiered at the Zürich Schauspielhaus on 4 February 1943. Text: In Collected Plays: Six: London: Methuen, 1994. A new produc…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:28AMMonday, January 14, 2013
The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek is best known in English-speaking countries as the author of The Piano Teacher and other novels (or, more likely, through Michael Han…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:26AMThursday, January 10, 2013
As I hitch up my pants and swing into the critical saddle again, I’m musing about what kind of value my own reviews and essays might offer that may not be found anywhere else (aside fr…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:39AMWednesday, January 9, 2013
Bertolt Brecht and Wallace Shawn represent two kinds of political theatre; Reverend Billy represents a third, more raucous and comic variety. The activist persona of Bill Talen, Reverend Bil…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:45AMTuesday, January 8, 2013
The Fever by Wallace Shawn. “First performed, by the author, in January 1990 in an apartment near Seventh Avenue in New York City,” according to the published version of the play…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:28AMMonday, January 7, 2013
In a particularly silly essay for the Wall Street Journal last week, critic Joseph Epstein wrote, “[Lyricist Yip] Harburg believed it was the political dimension ‘that Bernard Sh…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:19AMFriday, January 4, 2013
Keen-eyed readers will note that the last month or so has seen somewhat light posting here: more articles from the archive than usual (though, to paraphrase a promotional slogan from the era…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:42AMThursday, January 3, 2013
This year will see a mini-festival of Wallace Shawn plays in New York. The main event will be the upcoming Wallace Shawn-André Gregory Project co-produced by the Public Theater and Theatre …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:38AMMonday, December 31, 2012
Given the day, it may be appropriate to conclude with Maurice Ravel’s La valse (1920). In his Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Carl Schorske writes: At the close of World W…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:51AMFriday, December 28, 2012
Of course, for all that, the writing did not stop. Hoffmansthal turned his attention away from lyric poetry and towards the theatre (and the six operas he wrote with Richard Strauss), Adorno…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:20PMLord Chandos: My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently. … Even in familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinions…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:37AMThursday, December 27, 2012
Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? caused a small storm when it was published by Yale University Press in 2010. The London press picked up on a few minor comments ab…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:04AMWednesday, December 26, 2012
My essay “Theatre as sanctuary” appears in the latest issue of Urthona, a UK journal that has explored “the arts and world culture from a Buddhist perspective” since …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:43AMMonday, December 24, 2012
On 9 December 1911, Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden für gemischten Chor a cappella (Opus 11) was premiered at Vienna’s Großer Musikvereins-Saal under the baton of Franz Sc…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:43AMFriday, December 21, 2012
As readers of this blog know, if everybody’s doing something, I feel compelled to do it too. Below is a list of the most popular posts on Superfluities Redux over the past 12 months. M…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:34AMThursday, December 20, 2012
One of the major reasons for my growing disillusionment with contemporary American drama criticism and practice – I’m one short step away from saying “I don’t care …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:33AMWednesday, December 19, 2012
It’s not too late to enjoy Marilyn Nonken’s new album of music by Hugues Dufourt and Joshua Fineberg, Voix Voilées, for the holidays. The Métier release features a selection of…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:51AMTuesday, December 18, 2012
Tickets go on sale at 2.00pm today for a by-public-demand additional performance of Mike Daisey’s Fucking Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand at Joe’s Pub on Thursday, 17 January 2013, at 7…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:58AMMonday, December 17, 2012
“In general, I make the demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in Chapter 40 of Volume 2…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:11AMFriday, December 14, 2012
To round out this week’s essays and links on criticism, and at the risk of boring Cameron Woodhead further (at least when there’s a hoary, 50-year-old Sondheim musical comedy to …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:39AMThursday, December 13, 2012
It’s Old Home Week in the comments section of my post “Theatre blogosphere dead; no services planned” from Tuesday (which, curiously, garnered even more page views than Mon…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:46AMWednesday, December 12, 2012
About twenty years ago, more or less as a dare to myself, I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, all 1,088 pages of it, from cover to cover. About 150 pages into it, I began to develop a sl…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:10PMWhen Michael Billington began his “A to Z of modern drama” series for the Guardian late last year, he began with a look at Absurdism. I responded shortly after it was posted; the…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:35AMTuesday, December 11, 2012
“I actually think one of the reasons why the theatrosphere essentially died is that things got better on our big issue (new play development),” someone wrote on a Twitter account…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:16AMSunday, December 9, 2012
The Fall 2012 issue of Modern Drama features “The Canonization of Christopher Shinn: A Modest Proposal on Ethics” by Stephen Bottoms, the first major academic consideration of th…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:10PMFriday, December 7, 2012
To prepare for a new year, I will be moving several of my previous posts on eroticism, transgression, and tragedy over here over the next few weeks. They have been getting a little lost in t…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:07PMCulturebot, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year, has launched a new initiative called the “Citizen Critic Project,” which seeks to empower writers and thinkers o…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:15AMThursday, December 6, 2012
Most of the obituaries and remembrances of composer Jonathan Harvey that I’ve read this week cite not only the quality of the man’s work but the also quality of his character. &#…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 04:46PMJonathan Harvey, who passed away yesterday, was considered one of the most important new music composers of the past 40 years (which explains why the New York Times hasn’t yet run an o…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:36AM 
