Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Carol

    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…

  • A Christmas Carol

    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…

  • Faust: A Love Story

    Faust: A Love Story

    In retrospect, it is not that surprising how easily the Faust story adapts as a Christmas play. It’s just that it had never occurred to me as it did to the Vesturport and Reykjavík City Theatres of Iceland whose FAUST: A LOVE STORY is playing – in English – this weekend at BAM. Poinsettias greet…

  • Wake in Fright

    Wake in Fright

    In his great essay On Racine, the French theorist Roland Barthes observed that the most ancient of tragedies arose in the arid and sundrenched landscapes of the Mediterranean, under merciless skies and aside great oceans. It would have been no accident that a sense of cosmic isolation and the exigencies of survival posed a dramatic…