Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Antigone

    Antigone

    ANTIGONE is the most sedate of the productions I have seen directed by Ivo van Hove, but it might be the most deeply thought-provoking. There is little to be gained from it without thought. It hasn’t the sadism of his Hedda Gabler, the pain of his Cries and Whispers, the angst of his Scenes from…

  • Miss Julie

    Miss Julie

    I think that I have never seen a Miss Julie quite like Chulpan Khamatova’s. It’s not just that Thomas Ostermeier, the director, and Mikhail Durnenkov, the adapter, have updated and transposed Strindberg’s 1888 original, making Julie the spoiled daughter of a Russian general rather than a Swedish count, the celebration of New Year’s instead of…

  • Ubu roi

    Ubu roi

    Cheek by Jowl’s UBU ROI is a brilliant contradiction. It is austere and messy, infantile and wise, ego and id, beautiful and repulsive. It hangs together and falls apart. Lasts long and ends soon. Grosses out and achieves epiphany. It is not to be missed and – no, it is not to be missed. Not,…

  • Antigona

    Antigona

    Noche Flamenca’s ANTIGONA presents Sophocles’ tragedy using the conventions of flamenco dance, music and song. It connects the original theme, of a sister seeking to bury a disgraced brother against the dictates of the city state of Thebes, with recent efforts to exhume, identify and respectfully re-inter victims of the Franco regime in Spain. In…

  • Druid Shakespeare

    Druid Shakespeare

    Death, in DRUID SHAKESPEARE: THE HISTORY PLAYS, is an invading parasite. Crosses accumulate on grave mounds like sprouts from bulbs, lives owed, as someone says, to God, payment, with interest, for birth in the world. The plays essayed by this Irish company are four in seven hours – the tetralogy of Richard II, Henry IV…

  • Two Gentlemen of Verona

    Two Gentlemen of Verona

    Sets and costumes are, when you get right down to it, a bit redundant if you are the Fiasco Theater. They are the quintessential troupe, pop-up players who could make do with the clothes they came in, the lines in their heads, and whatever is lying about to make a prop of. But, since they…

  • Doruntine

    Doruntine

    A lot of theater happens because its creators have something to say. But New York’s Blessed Unrest has something to tell. To see them is an act of devotion to the significance of storytelling, psychological, aesthetic, and ideological, and the pleasure to be had from it. They enact not just the allure of the tale…

  • Comida de puta

    Comida de puta

    COMIDA DE PUTA (F%&KING LOUSY FOOD), a new play by Desi Moreno-Penson at the West End Theater, transposes the Greek myth of Phaedra to the Nuyorican Bronx and its cosmology to the spirit world of Santeria. There are signposts along the way that point to the original, if you wish to follow them. The Phaedra…

  • From the Earth to the Moon

    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…

  • Skylight

    Skylight

    Carey Mulligan is as good onstage at the John Golden Theatre as she is in the movies. As Kyra, the passionate teacher in David Hare‘s SKYLIGHT, she seems, quite simply, settled into the modest flat and routine, hard-nosed realism of the character. It is her place, her home, her way of being. Echoing what I…