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Lulu
In William Kentridge’s production of Alban Berg’s LULU at the Metropolitan Opera, consciousness comes, hesitantly, into being, fragments, reconfigures itself, then shatters again, and is still, hours later, in uncertain consonance with the exterior world. It’s a completely realized work of Expressionist theater, the fin de siècle form that portrayed an individual perspective at odds…
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Machinal
Any credible list of the greatest U.S. plays would include Sophie Treadwell’s MACHINAL. It is our tautest and most rigorously constructed in the Expressionist mode, by any standard a masterpiece of feminist art, and one of the most universally applicable (and least commercially motivated) of all BOATS (Based-On-A-True-Story) dramas. It has not been revived on…