446 stories by "George Hunka"
The theme of this week’s entries, it has emerged, has been my re-acquaintance with H.L. Mencken after many years. Somewhere in the deeper recesses of my personal archive there lies a c…
The Supreme Being has been taking a lot of lumps this week. Although CNN already has its own wrathful Old Testament dispenser of judgment and retribution, its religion editor Dan Gilgoff non…
On 29 June I had the pleasure, through the generosity of acquaintances, to visit the Park Avenue Armory for Philharmonic 360 and rare performances of Pierre Boulez’ Rituel in Memoriam …
H.L. Mencken cut his satirical teeth on drama and theatre, as the excellent new anthology, The Collected Drama of H.L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism, edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Sca…
The critic/dramatist dichotomy continues to break down in small ways; Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf, directed by Gordon Edelstein, opens at the Lon…
The National Theatre’s production of Scenes from an Execution with Fiona Shaw opens on 27 September; in 2008 I reviewed the Potomac Theatre Company production with Jan Maxwell here in …
Along with Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst was the most notable of the directors of the Neue Sachlichkeit period in Weimar film. Establishing himself with The Joyless Street in 1925, Greta Garbo̵…
German-language culture and art from 1899 (when the first edition of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams appeared in Vienna) through 1933 remains timely. The Central European geographical…
Once you remove subject matter, plot, and character from a political drama — that is, the explicit politics of it — what is left? In a short text called “Brecht out of fash…
On the occasion of the opening of her Sports Play by the Just a Must theatre company now touring England and Wales, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek participated in an in…
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rou…
It is necessary, once a writer has made some kind of discovery or experienced some kind of epiphany, to put that discovery and epiphany at arm’s length — to contemplate it and ma…
At the recently-resurrected Clyde Fitch Report (now under new management), OccupyTCG controversialist Ian Thal just completed a fascinating two-part analysis of the Israeli theatre Habima…
Originally published in July 2010. Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution will be produced by London’s National Theatre later this year; melancholy is central to my own new pla…
In a post at his blog Adaptistration today, Drew McManus extends a few notes he offered here yesterday in “The only thing we have to fear is each other.” It is particularly inter…
It may be worth stepping outside the institutional models for theatre in America to look at the condition of another art, classical music — specifically in its high-culture status as t…
About ten years ago, composer Joshua Fineberg considered the reasons why anyone would write music that might be called “difficult” in an essay called “Classical music: Why …
I have been following with some interest Ian Thal’s recent reports from the recent TCG conference in Boston (Part I is here, Part II here, with a Part III promised at some point), and …
In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the words “playwright” and “dramatist” had not yet been coined. Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare were known by the designatio…
Yesterday I went through my first version of the Erlkönig play which I started last year under the title of The Elf King; of the 30 pages I completed then, perhaps two of them will end up i…
The publication of the Cambridge University Press edition of Schopenhauer’s works continues in October with the release of On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings.…
How to endure under the burden of acknowledged despair: when that which was to raise him over the limits of the earth drowns him in the sea instead (a comic twist and reversal), when the onl…
The decision to embrace an aesthetic of asceticism, of essentialism, of restraint is essentially a moral decision, a decision easier to make for those who already have an affinity with it, w…
I finally tracked down the Beckett conversation to which I referred earlier this week; it is reported in Anthony Cronin’s biography Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996). In the la…
Those of us on the Lower East Side of New York for whom “the late Michael Jackson” will always refer to a Beer Hunter and never a Gloved One are enjoying Top Hops, a small beer e…
