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Pericles
No play in Shakespeare is more impelled by the power of story than PERICLES. It could be a tale improvised on the spot, out of bits of myth and wrinkles of fate, a complication here, a resolution there. Its domain is the Mediterranean, which means, in the age of Shakespeare, a tale of all the…
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Two Gentlemen of Verona
Sets and costumes are, when you get right down to it, a bit redundant if you are the Fiasco Theater. They are the quintessential troupe, pop-up players who could make do with the clothes they came in, the lines in their heads, and whatever is lying about to make a prop of. But, since they…
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Tamburlaine the Great
It is, to begin with, astounding to be watching an actual production of Christopher Marlowe’s TAMBERLAINE THE GREAT on a professional stage. Marlowe is all too easily relegated to second place in the Elizabethan sweepstakes, and it is thrilling, for a change, to feel his theatrical pulse and the pure sensation of his storytelling. Michael…
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The Killer
The Bérenger plays of Ionesco – in which an ordinary man finds himself in a variety of situations – are what they are, but it can be illuminating to consider them in terms of artistic and literary movements. I tend to agree that they don’t exactly qualify as existentialist or absurdist. It is, granted, pretty…
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King Lear
The art of the stage is largely one of clearing space, of getting impediments out of the way and avoiding the incursion of new ones, demarcating fields on which patterns of experience emerge through time, be they psychic, spiritual, or ideological. A new lushness can take root, or a greater austerity. Or both, as they…
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Midsummer Night’s Dream
Julie Taymor’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is Shakespeare in bedclothes, and sheets in particular: billowing sheets, mussed sheets, straightened and cornered sheets, sheets that wormhole through trap doors and turn into bowers and hammocks, sheets hastily wrapped around discovered lovers, sheets turned into projection screens that demarcate the horizons of the dream world. The whole…