Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • The Cherry Orchard

    The Cherry Orchard

    Things are ironically prominent in the THE CHERRY ORCHARD brought by the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Most of the action happens on a pile of household possessions, much of it covered in white sheets, at audience level, in front of a stage blocked, most of the time,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Cinderella

    Cinderella

    There was, I thought as I listened to Valery Gergiev conduct Prokofiev’s music to the ballet of CINDERELLA, something radical about it. It seems actively to resist Romanticism, despite the fairy tale it depicts, and to veer full scale into the abstraction and self-consciousness of Modernism. It is only at the moments of literal romance…

  • A Doll’s House

    A Doll’s House

    The version of A DOLL’S HOUSE currently at BAM positions the iconic play within the Ibsen canon as a whole, an act that is no mere literary exercise, but which draws upon the entire body of work to invigorate the drama at hand. I think that there is no other playwright who so approaches Shakespeare…

  • King Lear

    King Lear

    The end of the Chichester Festival Theatre’s KING LEAR tore my heart out and cast its remnants on a desolate plain. But I’ll get to that later. Up to then, Angus Jackson’s production, currently on loan to BAM, is refreshingly straightforward but somewhat nondescript; it tells the story, without dragging, but rises only occasionally to…

  • Green Porno

    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…

  • Enemy of the People

    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,…

  • Then, 1000 Years of Peace

    Then, 1000 Years of Peace

    You can never read all of the books, or see all of the films, or visit all of the places, or speak all of the languages, or see all of the theatre and the dance and the opera, or listen to all of the songs, or sing them, or embrace every lover, or wonder at…