Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Mariel Martínez

    Mariel Martínez

    BUENOS AIRES … CUANDO LEJOS ME VI  is the title of a show by Mariel Martínez & La Porteño Tango Trio currently in Madrid to promote a CD of the same name. I have admired Martínez’s recordings since listening to her 2010 Perfume de tango. The album includes a compelling interpretation of  “Luna curiosa,” a…

  • An Octoroon

    An Octoroon

    As dramaturgy alone, AN OCTOROON is exhilarating, but its pleasures – for such they are – run deeper. The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the director Sarah Benson have restored, recast, retooled, and revived Dion Boucicault‘s THE OCTOROON with a mimetic deftness that reifies and exposes the racialist assumptions and stereotypes that animate, indeed dramatize, the…

  • The Iceman Cometh

    The Iceman Cometh

    Brian Dennehy, who plays Larry in the Goodman Theatre’s THE ICEMAN COMETH at BAM, is the sort of actor who gets you imagining in advance what he will be like. Metaphors involving hulking animals form before their time. He will sulk like a defeated bear, howl like a yeti, hang his arms like an ape.…

  • Havana Rakatan

    Havana Rakatan

    After the intermission, HAVANA RAKATAN moves inside, from the streets and waterfront locations evoked in the first act to a scenography of nightclubs and theatrical shows. It seems, suddenly and counter-intuitively, more authentic than it did before. Colorfully dressed farmers and urban workers, dancing in celebration of weddings, harvests, fiestas, might seem, on the surface,…

  • A Month in The Country

    A Month in The Country

    Taylor Schilling has as thin a theatrical resumé as anyone in A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY, but she dominates the first half of the Classic Stage Company’s production of Turgenev’s pre-Chekhovian comic drama. She is imposing in stature and resonant as a bell, with a focus astute and un-rattled by the peculiarities of the material.…

  • Let the Right One In

    Let the Right One In

    Eli, the adolescent vampire of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is scary strong, and Rebecca Benson, the adult who plays her, is scary good. There is a scene in the second act that is, within the universe of the play, an agon between life and death, living human and undead adversary.…

  • Tristan and Yseult

    Tristan and Yseult

    The story of Tristan and Isolde shares with Romeo and Juliet a special status among the archetypes of love, which for the Romantics was a thing so strong that it doomed its feelers, its sublimity fulfilled only through the greater sublimity of death. But I am convinced, having seen TRISTAN AND YSEULT, which revives the…

  • Tamburlaine the Great

    Tamburlaine the Great

    It is, to begin with, astounding to be watching an actual production of Christopher Marlowe’s TAMBERLAINE THE GREAT on a professional stage. Marlowe is all too easily relegated to second place in the Elizabethan sweepstakes, and it is thrilling, for a change, to feel his theatrical pulse and the pure sensation of his storytelling. Michael…

  • The Maids

    The Maids

    From the moment I saw Alice Babidge’s design for Jean Genet’s THE MAIDS, I knew I would feel differently about this, the third Cate Blanchett import I have seen from the Sydney Theatre Company. It has the virtue of being spare and sumptuous at the same time and makes no distinction between costume and décor.…

  • Village Bike

    Village Bike

    The title of VILLAGE BIKE comes from British slang for “town slut” or “loose woman,” which is delicate ground to stand – or ride – upon even for a playwright, such as Penelope Skinner, with feminist intentions. But Skinner’s dialogue is so sharply observed, her play so astutely structured, and the cast that the MCC…