Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Julieta

    Julieta

    At the start of JULIETA, the folds of a red cloth expose a recognizable lushness. This is “Un film de Almodóvar.”  The cloth belongs, when the shot pulls back, to a dressing gown worn by Julieta, played by Emma Suárez, no less luminous now than she was in the Julio Medem films in which I…

  • ma ma

    ma ma

    I am avoiding the obvious word to describe Penélope Cruz in MA MA, but so be it if by saying that she illumes the screen I call the cliché to mind. Magda is among her finest creations, a great screen performance. It is no surprise that Julio Medem, the most illuminative of contemporary directors, elicited…

  • 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…

  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

    The plays and dramatis personae of Tennessee Williams are basically abstractions of emotions and other states of being. Stanley and Blanche are masculinity and femininity abstracted; in a very real sense they are detached qualities rather than people, even in the limited sense that fictional creations aspire to be. I think of the dreamy sentimentality…