There’s something distasteful about rank ambition and its stench is all over the Aurora Theater’s production of Simon Block’s stage adaption of Jonathan Safran Foer’s kind-of-celebrated, first novel, Everything is Illuminated. The whole enterprise is what we might call anxious for significance.
Read MoreIf An Enemy of the People is a battle about truth, both play and production relentlessly pursue its aesthetic correlative: how to depict reality. Today, Ibsen’s realism has become—in a greatly diluted form—ours. By embracing aggressive, non-realistic staging techniques, Ostemeier re-imagines Ibsen’s most radical goals of representing the world, and in fact demands that his production make us feel the shock of it, the shock of what is actually in front of us.
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