Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Simon Starling: At Twilight

    Simon Starling: At Twilight

    SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh drama to break with Naturalism and realist art in general. Ultimate reality was, to a Symbolist like Yeats, immaterial but accessible…

  • The Crucible

    The Crucible

    The director Ivo van Hove has turned his eye on THE CRUCIBLE, Arthur Miller’s treatment, in 1953, of the Salem witch trials as analogous to McCarthyism. Van Hove’s version begins, as did his A View from the Bridge, also by Miller, with a black scrim interposed between the audience and the playing area. No –…

  • 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,…

  • A View From the Bridge

    A View From the Bridge

    I took an onstage seat for the Young Vic production at the Lyceum in New York. First row, right, center. I stared at a black scrim, an aisle’s width away. Two hours later, there was a drop of red liquid on my shoe. It dissipated harmlessly. I sat breathless. I wasn’t able to go with…

  • Thérèse Raquin

    Thérèse Raquin

    The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…

  • Miss Julie

    Miss Julie

    I think that I have never seen a Miss Julie quite like Chulpan Khamatova’s. It’s not just that Thomas Ostermeier, the director, and Mikhail Durnenkov, the adapter, have updated and transposed Strindberg’s 1888 original, making Julie the spoiled daughter of a Russian general rather than a Swedish count, the celebration of New Year’s instead of…

  • Skylight

    Skylight

    Carey Mulligan is as good onstage at the John Golden Theatre as she is in the movies. As Kyra, the passionate teacher in David Hare‘s SKYLIGHT, she seems, quite simply, settled into the modest flat and routine, hard-nosed realism of the character. It is her place, her home, her way of being. Echoing what I…

  • 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.…

  • 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.…

  • 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…