446 stories by "George Hunka"
No individual’s handwriting quite resembles any other. In critical literature studies, manuscript examination is an attempt to follow a work from its ultimate appearance in print back …
After posting “Looking back, looking ahead” yesterday, I found that Slate was having a Joseph Heller day of its own. Yesterday they posted Walter Kirn’s long think piece on…
Where are the Hellers and Gaddises of yesteryear? The fiftieth anniversary of the 1961 publication of Catch-22 has crept up on us, marked by the publication of the first major biography of t…
In 2009, the BBC’s Arena series presented a two-part documentary about Harold Pinter, directed by Nigel Williams. The first part of the documentary, The Room, is below, and feature…
The reviews are in for the PTP/NYC production of Howard Barker’s Victory: Choices in Reaction that runs through the end of July, and for a change most reviewers seem to agree with me. …
The injustice committed by all cheerful art, especially by entertainment, is probably an injustice to the dead; to accumulated, speechless pain. Still, black art bears features that would, i…
A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” which I described in connection with my critique of…
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Booth called the conclusion of King Lear the “most terrifying five minutes of literature.” Below, the final scene of the play, from the 1983 televisio…
In contradiction to many of my colleagues, I have been ambivalent about the plays of Tony Kushner since I saw the Broadway production of Perestroika (the second half of Angels in America) in…
Victory: Choices in Reaction by Howard Barker. A PTP/NYC production directed by Richard Romagnoli. Scenic design: Hallie Zieselman. Lighting design: Mark Evancho. Costume design: Carlie Craw…
Rarely rescreened, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg‘s seven-hour Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) remains one of the great masterpieces of the form. Below, a ten-minute video essay on the film…
I wrote the below essay for the original Superfluities journal in May 2006, just before I began to write the material contained in Word Made Flesh. At the time I gave it the title “The…
Victory: Choices in Reaction will receive its United States premiere next Tuesday, 12 July, as part of the PTP/NYC summer season at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street in New York. The pl…
Comparing his own work to that of his mentor, Samuel Beckett said, “Joyce is a putter-inner, and I’m a taker-outer.” For Beckett, art was contractive, not expansive: a delv…
In the YouTube clip below, Glenn Gould performs Anton Webern’s 1936 Variations for Piano (Op. 27), the only solo piano composition to which Webern assigned an opus number. The Wikipedi…
Just a reminder that a full index of Superfluities Redux posts since December 2006, listed alphabetically by category, is available here. Happy reading.
“What do they know of theatre who only theatre know?” goes Aleks Sierz’ cautionary exhortation at his Pirate Dog journal, and it is an interesting question, especially from…
On a bright note today, Chris Wilkinson (also known as “Christopher Haydon” in his professional theatrical work), who contributes the weekly “Noises Off” column to th…
At the New York Review of Books online journal for 11 June, James Fenton discusses religion, audience reaction, the prejudices of the Mormon church and blindness in “The Book of Mormon…
At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes: Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist…
Theatre, as an art form, is not as deeply embedded in the history of America's modern culture as it is in Europe's Continue reading...
