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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 drama to break with Naturalism and realist art in general. Ultimate reality was, to a Symbolist like Yeats, immaterial but accessible…
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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 to layer it further. To be Bedlam doing it at The Gym at Judson, with a flair for double-casting and Shakespearean…
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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 the actor’s conundrum to know the mind of the person she plays and make him knowable to…
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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 autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…
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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 Jules Verne is not, at least in this country, so much read anymore. Part of this is simply…
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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 wall, things on the street, park benches, blue in the background, blue in the foreground, blue somewhere in the…
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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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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 Columbia University. We gathered at the university gate, bearing as our standard a rendering of Lorca’s face, composed,…
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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 induced kinesthetic illusion, translates not only the novel’s style but its thematic essence. Gatsby is a novella of memory, of…
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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 least not in their usual form. Serpa is an experimentalist, and an intellectual, and her repertory includes…