446 stories by "George Hunka"
Simon Critchley‘s Very Little … Almost Nothing attempts a response to a stylish nihilism in which much of 21st century culture seems mired. He traverses a philosophical path sign…
Every dramatist must decide for whom he is writing his plays, and I’ve decided that I’m writing my plays for my wife, my children, and myself, and no others. This is a conception…
Krzysztof Penderecki‘s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1959) was composed for 52 string instruments. At first it seemed to the composer a mere experiment in form, counterpoint, a…
Philosophy is an art of touching, just as sex is an art of intelligence. Touch is the living experience of the world on the part of what “thinks thought” in us. Philosophy is an …
Richard Foreman is asking for your help. Though Foreman’s new play Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) is due to open at the Public Theater next year, his Ontological-Hysteric T…
In the late 1500s, when the Elizabethan theatre was just coming of age, there were few structures in London purpose-built for theatrical presentation, and very few, if any, in the provinces …
On those rare occasions when Marilyn and I find ourselves free of the children on a weekday evening, we’re lucky enough to have a wide choice of restaurants on the Lower East Side, but…
Poking around on the American Theatre Critics Association Web site the other day, I came across Harold Clurman’s 1964 list of what an anonymous annotator called “12 commandments&…
The snickers were all over the Facebook and Twitter feeds of theatre critics yesterday after they came across a press release from the production company of Strut & Fret. In what appears…
Not long ago I wrote about the figure of the salesman in American drama — it wasn’t a complete list, of course; among others I left out The Music Man‘s Prof. Harold Hill. F…
Howard Sherman considers — then rejects — the idea of a US national theatre, not least because we already have one, he says. “Despite protestations to the contrary, America…
In the Guardian yesterday, British dramatist Howard Brenton urged readers to “stand up for the West Bank’s Freedom Theatre.” Brenton wrote: The Freedom Theatre began as a c…
Perhaps because their European origins give them outsider status, Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield are the most incisive, intriguing filmmakers producing documentaries about American life t…
While the biographies by the Gelbs and Louis Sheaffer are standard references in regard to the dramatist, I am spending some time of late paging through Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer…
Written 1918; first produced 3 February 1920 at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway; closed May 1920 after 111 performances. Directed by Homer Saint-Gaudens; produced by John D. Williams. With R…
In my only nod to this Sunday’s Tony awards, I pass along this quote from Jan Maxwell, who this year is nominated as lead actress in a musical for her performance in Follies. In this a…
“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit,” William Faulkner said …
I should note here, because I’ve been writing more than usual about political theatre recently, that in many parts of the world theatre can be dangerous indeed — even children…
From other shores … Howard Sherman is requesting your assistance in compiling a list — or, really, a list-of-lists — of the “Ten Most Important Contemporary Plays,…
The salesman has been a central character of post-war American drama from Death of a Salesman to Glengarry Glen Ross. He has been treated somewhat impertinently, of course: deluded and desti…
I must say I never expected the names of the self-described feminist critic Jill Dolan of The Feminist Spectator and Howard Barker, often accused of misogyny, to be mentioned in the same bre…
Later this month the arts center Chapter in Cardiff, Wales, will present a mini-season of recent Howard Barker plays from both established and new independent companies. Opening on Tuesday 1…
Probably 1590"1. Text: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Roger Warren. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. The power of erotic desire to transform the self and undermine…
Speaking of older playwrights, I’m not sure how NPR celebrates significant birthdays of American dramatists, though it may do so to the extent that American television, cable or broadc…
The theatre is increasingly kind to the young, writes Michael Billington in a recent essay at the Guardian about young dramatists. Casting a cheerful and positive eye over the twenty-somethi…
