446 stories by "George Hunka"
While The New York Times seems to be giving some of its theatre space over to comedy now (to ameliorate some of the heavier drama criticism to be found in its pages and its Web site, no doub…
The Public Theater production of King Lear, with Sam Waterston, Michael McKean, and Bill Irwin and directed by James Macdonald, closes this weekend after a run which received lackluster revi…
Yesterday brought the second installment of dramatist Steve Waters‘ series “Secret Diary of a Playwright” at the Guardian, a pointed reminder that, more than the creation o…
Does anybody read George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism any more? I doubt it, even though what one great twentieth-century dramatist had to say about one great nineteenth-…
In the collection of John Whiting‘s essays At Ease in a Bright Red Tie: Writings on Theatre from Oberon Books, there is an undated note called “Statement for a Play,” which…
On the other hand, when writing a play, I find it important to stay quite clear of some other plays and writings that have addressed the same issues. Given the themes of The Elf King, I am k…
While The Elf King is not an erotic tragedy as I’ve explored that idea over the past several years, its theme does partake somewhat of the metaphysical qualities of sexuality and human…
I’m not sure that there’s much to be concerned about the closed-session Arena Stage event this past weekend focusing on the development of new American plays, as reported (perhap…
The poem “Erlkönig” by Goethe has been set to music several times (you can find Sir Walter Scott’s translation of the poem at this earlier post). Below, in a performance i…
After completing the first third (30+ pages) of The Elf King this weekend, I take a short breather so that speed does not overwhelm craft. This is always a challenge, this balancing act: one…
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…
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’…
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…
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 …
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.…
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…
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 …
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 i…
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’…
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…
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…
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…
Only 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…
It 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…
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…
