Pinter was the revolution that mid-century audiences wanted — and for almost 60 years he, along with Samuel Beckett, has stood for an ongoing theatrical revolt against conventional meaning.
Read MorePart of the pleasure of Star Finch’s gothic shocker Bondage is the way Finch catches the destabilizing force of simply being neither black nor white. As William Carlos Williams memorably summed it up, "the pure products of America go crazy."
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThere’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.).
Read MoreI’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.
Read MoreBut 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.
Read MoreThe desire to honor is a dangerous and conservative aesthetic. It panders and plays to the romantic and sentimental in all of us.
Read MoreUnder 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.
Read MoreWhere 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.
Read MoreIn 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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