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Tango Connection: Love Stories
Act I of TANGO CONNECTION: LOVE STORIES by Mariela Franganillo , currently playing at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, exposes the private relationships of several couples through theatrical dance, song and music. Act II portrays the public face of those relationships in the context of a social dance event. Hence the private lives that…
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Tango Argentino (Revisited)
This – the article reproduced above – is what I thought of tango long before I started to dance it socially and engage with its history and culture on a deeper and more personal level. I have wanted to track down this clipping, from the Boulder Daily Camera, without knowing where it was that I…
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These Seven Sicknesses
Green tea is served during the dinner and dessert breaks of the Flea Theater’s production of Sean Graney’s THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES, which telescopes the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles into a single play. The cast mingles with the audience during the intervals – the gentleman at the serving cart plays the warrior Ajax a few…
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Cries and Whispers
If there is a single work that drew me to European art film as an undergraduate it was Ingmar Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS. With its ticking clocks, raw yet controlled acting, and dark psychology (including an act of self-mutilation the shock value of which has only recently been equaled by von Trier’s Antichrist) it was…
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The Select
I have always had mixed feelings about the Hemingway ouvre, but The Sun Also Rises has the special virtue of being perfect. It is one of those novels – Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is another – that uses an anecdote involving a small number of characters to distill the essence of an historical moment. So I was…
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The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 1
The point of this post is not the Kraine Theater, tucked inside a portmanteau building on East 4th Street that also houses a second theater and a bohemian bar. The point is what the New York Neo-Futurists are doing inside, to wit (take a breath for this title): THE COMPLETE & CONDENSED STAGE DIRECTIONS OF…
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A Magic Flute
Of the historically significant theatrical productions that I wish somehow to have been in a position to see, Peter Brook’s pared-to-its-essence Carmen is near the top of the list. So I approached the same director’s hyper-condensed, multi-lingual A MAGIC FLUTE, presented by the Lincoln Center Festival, with a certain eagerness. The result is basically a…
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Sleep No More
I was one of those lining up on Memorial Day night to see Punchdrunk’s SLEEP NO MORE in the Chelsea gallery district. The Scottish play as nightmare is an old trope, well founded in the text. So to deconstruct it as a sort of haunted house theme park and fragment its episodes in the manner…
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The Marriage of Maria Braun
I saw the last performance of THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN on Sunday afternoon at BAM, with the memory of the Fassbinder film from many years ago still vivid in my mind. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the great naturalists of the cinema, and Braun was perhaps his most romantic work, lush and polished…
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Penelope
On one level, Enda Walsh’s PENELOPE is just a modernization of an episode from The Odyssey. Four suitors – living at the bottom of a drained out swimming pool on Odysseus’s Adriatic estate – vie for the affections of Penelope in advance of her husband’s homecoming – finally! – from the Trojan War. They continue…