In these end days of the year and perhaps the country, we might ask, just to while away the time, what we want from our American plays.
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There’s a simple understanding that to experience the epic, we have to identify with its opposite -- the lost traveller (Odysseus), the scared child (Huckleberry Finn), the harried bureaucrat (Joseph K.).
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I’m guessing, but one of the main reasons A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life are such great works of art is that their heroes are shattered, and they must put themselves back together in the coldest time of the year.
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But in bringing The Black Rider to its American core, Shotgun also brings us back to guns and bullets and the trauma at the heart of Burroughs’ art -- after all, he’s a confessed killer.
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The desire to honor is a dangerous and conservative aesthetic. It panders and plays to the romantic and sentimental in all of us.
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Under Jaron Hollander's inventive direction, the company's productions are more about a state of mind than mind-boggling stunts. There are many feats, some of them verging on the spectacular, but they occur in the service of conveying the aspirations and failures of people.
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Where 1984 revels in a no-way-out aesthetic of brutal, totalitarian extremes, Animal Farm is shiftier, more alive to the way power mutates, vanishes, and rumbles through a society. This makes it nice source material for our slippery times.
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In re-imagining the romance of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Thomas Bradshaw creates thrilling new myths that are sure to be as controversial as the old ones.
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Sarah Kane is a challenging writer with a kind of cultish following, but what is the cult really embracing and what was she really after?
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High on sensationalism and low in intelligence, the almost three-hour-long production doesn't leave space for us to think, reflect, or feel in any way.
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