446 stories by "George Hunka"
For an alternative view on the 9/11 remembrances today, visit Chris Hedges’ dark and disturbing “A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe,” published yesterday at Truthdi…
It’s properly more of a “Friday audio,” but below you can hear the first half of Theodor Adorno’s Streichquartett from 1921, composed when Adorno was 18, just as he b…
Paul Cava‘s photo-based collages and montages generate juxtapositions of the forbidden, the natural, the technical, and the human. The layered planes of the collages have a tendency to…
The secret of erotic tragedy remains a secret even in the telling, for its import lies in experience, not explication. This secret divides the communal theatrical audience into its individua…
I expect you’ll be hearing more from me about Herbert Marcuse’s slim 1978 monograph The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics in the coming weeks. In it, M…
The first catalog of titles from Contra Mundum Press, “organized to demonstrate that the foundation of thought, and of the freedom and the efficacy of thinking, is not in the mash-up o…
Though completed in the late 1930s, Brecht’s Life of Galileo was frequently revised through the war years and only received its first production with Brecht’s participation in Lo…
Superfluities Redux readers rarely leave comments on many of these posts, so I often leave it to Google Reader to pick up any mentions of what I write here. (True, there is the occasional Po…
The melancholy that attends the work of the late Expressionists, and especially those of the New Objectivity, is inherent in the work. In Scholz’ self-portrait above, the individual is…
A detail of Grünewald’s Crucifixion, the central panel of the Isenheim alterpiece, is the cover image for John Willett’s 1970 survey of Expressionism, published by the World Uni…
Running from Friday 16 September through Sunday 25 September at the Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets, the Katharsis Performance Project presents Fulya …
On The New York Times‘ (“We don’t just report it, we are it,” goes the current advertising slogan for the newspaper, which is deserving of a post in itself) “Ar…
The role of the elegy is to describe a closed system: the closed system of the dead individual, now bereft of possibility and imagination. It is also a dramatic performance in the form of mo…
Because a few of this week’s posts concerned criticism, I offer at the end of this week two pieces of same. The first is “The Con’s on Mamet,” a lengthy review of Dav…
In today’s New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes about the restaurant experience as theatre, from the very privileged and expensive perspective of the chef’s table. Now that t…
Theatre criticism, like theatre production itself, is a time-consuming, money-consuming, and grueling activity, and its rewards are few, especially for those of us who do not do it “fo…
Once in a while, it’s worth linking to other online theatre criticism publications, and not only to confirm that the Internet in some ways remains a last bastion of serious long-form d…
Less than two months after Samuel Beckett’s death on 22 December 1989, Harold Pinter recorded the below memoir of the dramatist under the title “A Wake for Sam.” Pinter sha…
Theatre and drama artists, along with the critical press, may be too busy with festivals near and far to respond in their usual manner to a few international crises of the past week (as well…
Keeping up with latest developments in drama, especially that which challenges the status quo consensus of what drama is and should be, requires a great deal of reading — these plays r…
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…
The 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…
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…
Let 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…
§ 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…
