Monday, November 4, 2013
Harold Pinter’s artistic vision focussed less on love than on the con. Born in 1930, Pinter grew up Jewish in modest circumstances in London’s East End, the beloved only child of…
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Period detail and a magnetic turn by Jeffrey Wright elevate the current season of “Boardwalk Empire.”
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:17PMMonday, October 21, 2013
Marie Antoinette continues to interest us because punishment does. Born in Vienna in 1755 and executed in Paris thirty-seven years later, she has never had what one might call a dramatically…
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In a series of interviews conducted with the British-born playwright Harold Pinter in 1971, Mel Gussow said that he was struck by the emotion and lyricism in some of the author’s post-…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, October 11, 2013
The notion that theatre is universal is specious, given the world of difference that can separate the productions in New York’s uptown and downtown theatres. In the nineteen-fifties, O…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 30, 2013
Writers, for the most part, find themselves not in writing but in revision. The “I” of personal narrative—the egotism it takes to display one’s point of view in a nov…
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What happens when you pimp out the pop in a pop masterpiece? Does it cheapen the original work by association? An unfortunate aspect of the thirty or so modern-day screen adaptations of R…
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When you think about the talented children of famous parents, you don’t necessarily think about their gifts so much as their genes. Could the famous offspring’s renown be based o…
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You know Lois Smith. You’ve seen her a million times. Onstage, in the movies, on TV. You might be thinking of Mary Louise Wilson or Elizabeth Wilson—two equally great actresses, …
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In the waning days of summer, when it’s still too warm to think about fall but it’s there, in the night air, I’ve been reading Richard Sewall’s essential 1974 book, &…
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The show is a crowd-pleaser, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why: most audiences are reacting to its charming narrative surface. But there’s more going on than that.
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Wallace Shawn’s primary impulse in his dramatic work is to fuck with the audience. Not through content—though he messes with that, too—but through form, which more or less …
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Days before Tennessee Williams’s 1967 chamber piece “The Two-Character Play” opened at New World Stages, I began to experience a certain apprehension. I think my anxiety wa…
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8220;Far from Heaven” (at Playwrights Horizons) is a problem musical, a genteel contrivance wrapped in “issues”—racism, homophobia, misogyny—that limit the show…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWriting in this magazine in 1970, Kennedy Fraser brilliantly described a boutique that was then gaining in popularity at Bendel’s. Called Stephen Burrows’ World, it was a univers…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, May 27, 2013
Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the t…
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8220;Made Here” is an online documentary series now in its third season. (The entire series can be viewed at madehereproject.org.) In it, we meet a variety of performing artists living…
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Once again, the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca’s considerable influence is being talked about, debated, celebrated. In addition to publishing his legendary plays—s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM8220;The Testament of Mary” (directed by Deborah Warner, at the Walter Kerr) is theatre porn. Stiff with its own seriousness, it’s a Broadway show that wants to impress us with i…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 22, 2013
Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Nance” (at the Lyceum) is a nearly perfect work of dramatic art, whose power derives from its equitable compassion and its unromantic view of my…
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My reservations about each show were minimized by four outstanding actors: Billy Porter in “Kinky Boots,” and De’Adre Aziza, Brandon J. Dirden, and Samantha Soule in the pl…
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Elaine Stritch has a new documentary coming out, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which will première at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19. That’s the happy news. What …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 25, 2013
Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is so extraordinary a work that it incites not writerly envy but pride. Published in 1958, it’s one of those pop master…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMAt the end of Guillermo Calderón’s strange, new, and vital “Neva” (at the Public, through March 31), the forty-two-year-old author and director—who grew up in Ch…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 4, 2013
In the theatre, for the most part, glamour belongs to those actors and performers who wear it like a second skin—a mystery you don’t want to unbutton, let alone analyze. But the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, February 25, 2013
If you listen to an actor’s voice carefully, you can tell something about her range. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sarah Paulson, when performing onstage, indulge in what I …
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Grace (Lauren Culpepper) and Leigh (Zosia Mamet) are roommates. They enter their darkened apartment, laughing. They’re both in their early twenties, miniskirted, and high from a night …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:12PMMonday, February 18, 2013
I’m not particularly comfortable around theatre people. The big gestures around little intimacies—“I saw you on the aisle at ‘Glengarry’; could you believe Al?!…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThe Lady in Orange said it first: “ever since i realized there was someone callt / a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag / i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness / …
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The big, enveloping spirit that emanates from the utterly outstanding revival of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan” (at La Mama) is part of the show’s essenti…
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Ever since “Sleep No More” proved that audiences don’t necessarily want to just sit and watch actors go about a playwright’s business framed by a proscenium, immersiv…
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