Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • The Hairy Ape

    The Hairy Ape

    The first image you see at Eugene O’Neill’s THE HAIRY APE at the Park Avenue Armory are rows and rows of seats, ready to absorb the arriving audience into a yellow, Borg-like mass. The implication is that, once we are seated, the play will redound on us with its expressionistic theme: society as a machine…

  • 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.…

  • The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 1

    The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 1

    The point of this post is not the Kraine Theater, tucked inside a portmanteau building on East 4th Street that also houses a second theater and a bohemian bar. The point is what the New York Neo-Futurists are doing inside, to wit (take a breath for this title): THE COMPLETE & CONDENSED STAGE DIRECTIONS OF…