Oct 31, 2016

Simon Starling: At Twilight

SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh dr...
Apr 9, 2016

Sense & Sensibility

To put Jane Austen on stage is to make sensible the implicit theatricality of her novels. To be Kate Hamill, adapting Sense and Sensibilty as SENSE & SENSIBILITY, and acting its principal role, is...
Dec 6, 2015

Carol

Acting is the art of the inscrutability of the self. If, as Sartre would have it, the other person is unknowable, and, as Grotowski said, “no one can know the mind of the other person,” then it is...
Nov 8, 2015

Thérèse Raquin

The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autu...
Apr 10, 2015

From the Earth to the Moon

He was, when I was growing up, a boy in a normative Middle American family, essential reading, along with Conan Doyle, Tolkien, and a few others. But I have the sense, hoping that I am wrong, that Jul...
Dec 27, 2013

Blue is the Warmest Color

The very first thing I noticed about BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR was that blue was the commonest color in shot, after shot, after shot. Articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, spots of paint on the w...
Dec 19, 2013

A Christmas Carol

Dickens’ Scrooge has always reminded me, at least a little, of Shakespeare’s Lear. There is a similar majesty to his tale, although the outcome is comic rather than tragic, and he is, of course, p...
Jun 12, 2013

La ruta de Lorca

On June 5, the birthday of the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, I joined LA RUTA DE LORCA EN NUEVA YORK, a walking tour of some of the poet’s haunts in the vicinity of C...
May 15, 2013

The Great Gatsby

I saw Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY through 3D glasses, and I would not have seen it any other way. The whimsical unreality of it, the whole cinematic pop-up book of staggered planes and optically...
Mar 24, 2013

Sara Serpa

I’ve heard good report of the Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa for a while now, and I finally heard her live on Friday night. Her genre is jazz, but do not expect to hear the standards from her, at le...