446 stories by "George Hunka"
Karen Malpede’s Another Life will open at the Theater for the New City in late March as part of Theatre Three Collaborative‘s Festival of Conscience, two plays and a series of co…
Recently reading Jonathan Kalb’s Great Lengths, his book about marathon theatre productions, I began to muse about the idea of excess. In recent years it has been not only excessive le…
The work of a composer is to create Time. There is nothing more difficult than creating time, because it isn't natural for man. But if you want to compose, you have to reposition yourself ea…
Like it or not, for most Americans Broadway is America’s center of theatre and drama. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars are invested in Broadway shows every year, catering …
I’m delighted to announce that a few days ago I joined the editorial board of “Backpages,” the back-of-the-book section of Routledge’s Contemporary Theatre Review dev…
First published here in January 2010. Maurice Benn’s study of the work of Georg Büchner suggests that Büchner may have been familiar with Schopenhauer’s philosophy (The World a…
Despite the provisional obituaries that continue to be written about the Modernist project, some publishers and editors keep the flame alight. The newest among them is Contra Mundum Press, e…
The Fever by Wallace Shawn. Directed by Lars Norén; adaptation by Norén and Simona Maicanescu; lighting by Jean Poisson; costume by Chatoon; sound by Sophie Buisson; artistic collaboration…
I’ll be bundling up later for the first of my two visits to La MaMa ETC over the next few weeks: tonight, for Simona Maicanescu in Lars Norén’s new production of Wallace Shawn&#…
Richard Foreman has a busy spring ahead. Along with the opening of his new play Old-Fashioned Prostitutes at the Public Theater this April, his film Once Every Day will begin a short run at …
Time, space, and money being finite quantities in this world, the books that a person chooses to surround oneself with become a fascinating glimpse into the life of that mind. Far more than …
For the past several years, Howard Barker has been continuing his sojourn into the uncharted waters of theatre through a project he has identified as “Plethora and bare sufficiency,…
The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht. Written 1938-41; premiered at the Zürich Schauspielhaus on 4 February 1943. Text: In Collected Plays: Six: London: Methuen, 1994. A new produc…
The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek is best known in English-speaking countries as the author of The Piano Teacher and other novels (or, more likely, through Michael Han…
As I hitch up my pants and swing into the critical saddle again, I’m musing about what kind of value my own reviews and essays might offer that may not be found anywhere else (aside fr…
Bertolt Brecht and Wallace Shawn represent two kinds of political theatre; Reverend Billy represents a third, more raucous and comic variety. The activist persona of Bill Talen, Reverend Bil…
The Fever by Wallace Shawn. “First performed, by the author, in January 1990 in an apartment near Seventh Avenue in New York City,” according to the published version of the play…
In a particularly silly essay for the Wall Street Journal last week, critic Joseph Epstein wrote, “[Lyricist Yip] Harburg believed it was the political dimension ‘that Bernard Sh…
Keen-eyed readers will note that the last month or so has seen somewhat light posting here: more articles from the archive than usual (though, to paraphrase a promotional slogan from the era…
This year will see a mini-festival of Wallace Shawn plays in New York. The main event will be the upcoming Wallace Shawn-André Gregory Project co-produced by the Public Theater and Theatre …
Given the day, it may be appropriate to conclude with Maurice Ravel’s La valse (1920). In his Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Carl Schorske writes: At the close of World W…
Of course, for all that, the writing did not stop. Hoffmansthal turned his attention away from lyric poetry and towards the theatre (and the six operas he wrote with Richard Strauss), Adorno…
Lord Chandos: My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the abilÂity to think or to speak of anything coherently. … Even in familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinio…
Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? caused a small storm when it was published by Yale University Press in 2010. The London press picked up on a few minor comments ab…
My essay “Theatre as sanctuary” appears in the latest issue of Urthona, a UK journal that has explored “the arts and world culture from a Buddhist perspective” since …
