446 stories by "George Hunka"
Some future David Riesman or Theodor Adorno will one day try to assess why a trilogy of lite-BDSM erotic novels enjoyed such popularity at this moment in American history. They have been fir…
I’ve decided to take up again a project that looks at American drama since 9/11, which I first wrote about a few years ago, but in order to do so systematically I will need to establis…
He wasn’t speaking about the production process for new American drama, but T.S. Eliot may have described it well when he wrote that “Between the idea / And the reality / Between…
It is a delight to report that Cafe Katja‘s reopening at 79 Orchard Street this past Wednesday was such a wonderful pleasure. Owners Erwin Schröttner and Andrew Chase have doubled the…
Faced with covering non-arts-related South Jersey news for the first time in a 42-year career as an arts and culture writer, Philadelphia Inquirer theatre critic Howard Shapiro has decided i…
A cheerful Howard Barker talks to Mark Lawson about his relationship with Britain’s subsidized theatres, his status as an “afternoon painter” and his own practices in the r…
London’s critical darling at the moment is Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution, directed by Tom Cairns and featuring Fiona Shaw as Galactia, at the National Theatre. (A new …
Speaking of Philadelphia, maybe the best movie ever made in that city was the 1976 Mikey and Nicky, written and directed by Elaine May (born and raised in Philadelphia; she appeared on the s…
When I was a part of the Philadelphia theatre community in the mid-1980s as a playwright and the managing producer of the now-defunct Theatre Center Philadelphia, the city was just emerging …
If Maddy Costa’s interview with Howard Barker in the Guardian the other day seemed a bit brief, and Barker more pugnacious than usual, “The Curious Romance of Howard Barker,̶…
No English-language plays so exemplify the assumptions underlying radical elegance than those of Howard Barker. As Beckett said of Joyce (and perhaps of his own work), in Barker’s play…
It appears that Howard Barker has not lost his ability to divide audiences — not even with a play like Scenes from an Execution, first written for radio in 1985 and now appearing on th…
The traditional symbol for a ninth anniversary is “pottery,” the modern symbol “leather,” I’ve learned from conducting some not-too-intensive research on the In…
Among the most famous of the sketches that appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus was the “Dead Parrot” sketch, which matched Michael Palin and John Cleese in a battle of…
I am skeptical about the American two-party system, but not cynical enough (not yet) to refrain from participating in elections. There’s one coming up in six weeks, and though I voted …
In celebration of the opening this week at the National Theatre of Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution, I republish below my 2009 review of two books about the dramatist by David …
Today’s video is a rare 1958 television interview with Georges Bataille, nine minutes in length, discussing his book Literature and Evil. It appears after the notes on Bataille below, …
Elegance consists of a thoughtful, critical attitude towards the self and an organization of expression in a world which consists of a series of formless experiences. It imposes this organiz…
If there’s a theme that runs through what I admire about Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, Howard Barker’s plays, Marilyn Nonken’s music, it is something that might be sub…
Defenders of theatre as a form of entertainment in whatever its definition will receive a bit of a workout over the next few months, thanks to two downtown theatre companies across the stree…
Surprisingly, the New York Times today offers a few most readable articles, this time about feminism (or, perhaps more accurately, “feminisms”), conveniently published at the sam…
In 1987, ABC aired Basements, productions of two early Harold Pinter plays directed by Robert Altman; The Room is below. Linda Hunt plays Rose; Donald Pleasance is Mr. Kidd; the rest of the …
Arthur Schopenhauer never characterized his philosophy or himself as “pessimistic,” though he never rejected the characterization when it was applied to him. He uses the word onl…
Apropos of yesterday’s post, Jonathan Kalb’s Hot Review recently posted the entirety of an 12 October 2001 interview with Richard Foreman, portions of which first ran in a 2002 i…
In February 2011 I embarked on one of those grandiose projects to which I am occasionally susceptible, a survey of the effect that 9/11 had on American drama. I was unable to sustain the ded…
