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Paul Auster
New York has a lot of national centers and institutes whose programming I follow, but FIAF (French Institute Alliance Français) may have the most interesting and provocative. I say that as someone whose second language, such as it is, is Spanish, and who knows French only insofar as it resembles that other Romance language, or…
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The Heiress
What Jessica Chastain conveys with great success in THE HEIRESS is a young woman on the cusp of a change in manners. She is ill-at-ease in the 19th century of calling cards and formal visits, with its peculiar conventions of courtship and parental approbation, but with a certain cluelessness about what will replace it, and…
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4 Prepared Dreams
Hypnotism and the theater have a long and well-known relationship, beginning with the public demonstrations by the imitators of Dr. Mesmer in the 19th century and proceeding to the present. I still remember the acts that came through the parts of the country where I grew up, in which ordinary people, at least ostensibly, were…
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Rhinoceros
What makes me the most glad to have seen the Théâtre de la Ville revival of Ionesco’s RHINOCEROS were the faces of the rhinoceri hovering in the air, with their beautiful sad eyes, sweet and brutish at the same time, animal yet with a germ of sympathy for the human. In the possible world of…
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Daniel Berlin
Courtesy of guest chef Daniel Berlin, there was a special tasting menu this week at Aquavit to extol the flavors and ingredients of the Swedish region of Skåne. The style was contemporary, the flavors paradoxically earthy and clean, the textures complex and interactive, the plates photogenic in the extreme. A parcel of codfish, buried in…
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Liberal Arts
Josh Radnor – who acts in, directs and writes LIBERAL ARTS – plays an admissions officer in an unnamed urban university in New York City who revisits his alma mater, a liberals arts college in Ohio, also nameless, to deliver a tribute at the retirement dinner for a favorite professor. Before he leaves, we see…
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Omoo Solo Voice
I saw a rather fascinating vocal performance on Friday night at Two Moon Art House and Cafe in Brooklyn. This is only the second OMOO SOLO VOICE concert by the young Swiss singer-songwriter Emilie Weibel, and there is doubtless much refinement to come. What is striking about her show is that she travels light, just…
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Habit
Think of those situations when you find yourself looking through windows at the private lives of other people. Walks through small towns or suburban neighborhoods at night or in the evenings, when the lights are on in the homes you pass but the curtains are undrawn; certain units in apartment buildings right across the way…
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Magnus Eroticus
If you are like I was the day before yesterday, you know the Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis solely by virtue of the classic soundtrack for Never on Sunday, for which he won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1960. If you are like me today you would on Thursday evening have attended an intimate…
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Einstein on the Beach
Seeing EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH at BAM put me in mind of the designer Edward Gordon Craig, who just over a century ago publicly desired the transformation of actors into übermarionettes, by which means he would have wrestled the idiosyncratic presence of human beings on stage into the service of an overarching artistic vision. The…