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Green Porno
Isabella Rossellini’s GREEN PORNO is a series of short films that explore, usually with her in costume, the sexual and reproductive life of animals. They are both instructive and delightful (as Horace might have said) and moving (as Cicero would have added). There is an underlying didactic intent, combined with overt theatricality, that tempts one…
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Machinal
Any credible list of the greatest U.S. plays would include Sophie Treadwell’s MACHINAL. It is our tautest and most rigorously constructed in the Expressionist mode, by any standard a masterpiece of feminist art, and one of the most universally applicable (and least commercially motivated) of all BOATS (Based-On-A-True-Story) dramas. It has not been revived on…
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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, petty bourgeois instead of royal. In place of vain munificence, it is self-loathing stinginess that afflicts him, and he is brought…
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Much Ado About Nothing
The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit performs in prisons, centers for youth at risk, and the like, as well as dropping in at home base to offer particularly low cost Shakespeare to the Public’s regular patrons. It was interesting to see the Unit’s version of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING in a season during which there…
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Shakespeare on Broadway
If possible, see the Shakespeare’s Globe productions of TWELFE NIGHT and THE TRAGEDIE OF KING RICHARD THE THIRD back to back, on the same day. Go for drinks or dinner in between, make a day of it. It would also be good, budget and availability permitting, to opt for onstage seating for one and house…
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Glamour Tango
Polly Ferman presented her show GLAMOUR TANGO, subtitled “Tango in Feminine Form,” on Monday night at Tango House, using New York based, but international, talent, all of them, appropriately, women. It follows the basic form of a lot of tango shows. There is a live orchestra at the back of the stage, which includes Ayelen…
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Midsummer Night’s Dream
Julie Taymor’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is Shakespeare in bedclothes, and sheets in particular: billowing sheets, mussed sheets, straightened and cornered sheets, sheets that wormhole through trap doors and turn into bowers and hammocks, sheets hastily wrapped around discovered lovers, sheets turned into projection screens that demarcate the horizons of the dream world. The whole…
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Enemy of the People
In Thomas Ostermeier’s version of ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, we have met the people and they are us. In one of the cleverer manipulations of a Naturalist drama that I have seen, a genre of activist political theater is snuck right into the middle of Ibsen’s ironic critique of democracy and its discontents. The play,…
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Nosferatu
I was the one in the audience who liked the TR Warszara and Teatr Narodowy production of NOSFERATU that closed Saturday night at BAM. The show was in Polish, with English supertitles, and presented by an ensemble cast whose names (some of which have showed up in press reports) were not in the program. The…
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Romeo and Juliet
Tea Alagić’s production of ROMEO AND JULIET at Classic Stage Company is in the tradition of Peter Brook’s “empty space.” I can almost imagine that seminal figure of the modern theater as having directed it. The script is pared to its essence, to just the point at which trimming a little more would do injury…