446 stories by "George Hunka"
Harold Pinter (1930-2008) might be said to have domesticated Samuel Beckett‘s more metaphysical concerns by moving them from an abstract setting into the sitting- and living-rooms of h…
Tomorrow night, Wednesday 12 October at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken, whom the New York Times has called “a determined protector of important music” and “one of the greatest inte…
In yesterday’s Guardian, Maddy Costa discusses Edward Bond’s Saved, the controversial classic that is now receiving its first professional London revival in three decades at the …
I’m halfway through my list of my personal nominees for a new Theatre of Revolt — Brecht, Beckett, Albee and Müller so far — and, time permitting, next week will bring the…
Perhaps, for the most revolutionary dramatists, their followers take to the streets on occasion. The funeral cortege of German dramatist Heiner Müller (1929-1995) was “an impromptu pr…
Even the gentlest, most tentative outreach from one individual to another may eventually exhibit violence, hatred, and despair. This insight forms a wide significant stream in the plays of E…
A few posts on the art and business of playwriting have come my way. First, there’s Terry Teachout’s rather mournful but still hopeful “The Playwright’s Reward”…
As with Brecht’s plays, every dramatist writing after 1945 must contend with the plays of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). For both the American and European theatre, Beckett and Brecht …
The only playwright that my list of revolutionary dramatists shares with Robert Brustein’s is Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Though Brecht only lived for a decade after the end of the Sec…
The Occupy Wall Street protestors have now issued a laundry list of grievances and demands (this just before 700 of them were arrested trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge by foot yesterday, …
Tomorrow marks the eighth anniversary of Superfluities Redux, and this year the theatrical blogosphere crossed a Rubicon of sorts with the completion of the first (to my knowledge) master…
Dreamless Land, written and directed by Julia Jarcho, will be the next offering from Richard Maxwell’s company the New York City Players, opening at the Abrons Arts Center on 4 Novembe…
Jonathan Kalb’s new book from the University of Michigan Press, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, looks at seven contemporary theatrical works that test the extremes of d…
One stream of contemporary erotic tragedy must look to the urbanized Neue Sachlichkeit movement of Weimar Germany: there it will find considerable historic and aesthetic inspiration. The con…
I had a rare few spare minutes on Saturday and stopped in briefly at “Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life,” the new exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery which runs t…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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, …
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 …
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‘ &…
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…
The 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. …
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…
