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Angels Fall. Burn This. Balm in Gilead. The Fifth of July. Redwood Curtain. Lanford Wilson wrote these and more; when I saw them back in the 80s I felt privy to what seemed a golden age of theater. To experience his plays is to witness the theater at its most human, but also its most…
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Like the weather, the gloomy words of literature threaten to upend. I’ve been reading Christopher Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River; last night I got to the part where one of the characters commits a heinous act. I was so mad at him I almost threw the book across the room. I tossed…
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“I wanted to sound an alarm. But nothing had happened.” Alfieri, A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller. In the current revival of A View from the Bridge, the alarms ring throughout. The play’s big Greek epiphany centers on a matter of trust: Eddie Carbone, the dockworker, commits a betrayal so huge that…
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sisters by Lucille Clifton me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time…
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Or Jerome David, as he was known to his folks. Author of the penultimate coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye (and my personal favorite half-novel Franny and Zoey). RIP.
Continue readingPublished Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Before Decreation, the new William Forsythe work that appeared this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Gilman Opera House, there was Anne Carson’s Decreation, the title of a book and essay. The word doesn’t appear in Webster’s, but Carson defines it as “… an undoing of the creature…
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Time flies, I thought, as my partner and I wandered the main drag on a recent, all-too-brief trip to Woodstock. The media heralds the 40th anniversary of the event that besieged Yasgur’s farm and a generation’s doobie-fueled conscience, but little of its genuine spirit (what I imagine that to be) lives in the new land…
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He’ll set his foot down on the road and the wind in the trees be talking to him and everywhere he step on the road, that road’ll give back your name and something will pull him right up to your doorstep…but maybe he ain’t supposed to come back. Bynum, Joe Turner’s Come and…
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Passion. Desire. The ad copy for the current production of Desire Under the Elms is the kind of sexy teaser producers hope will put bodies in seats. No way would they tout the especial skills of Eugene O’Neill, an American playwright for the ages. But it’s his story up there, and while it’s by no…
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