By Bill Marx

Back in February of 2024 I began to write a weekly column for the newsletter on Substack. A few readers have asked that I post these opinion pieces in the magazine. Here is a selection of my favorites of 2025.

Favorite Columns of 2024

May 7 ,2025

In his 1987 volume Who Needs Theatre, Robert Brustein asserts that “theatergoing is one of a dwindling group of activities that bring Americans into communication with each other; it is, therefore, an enterprise that preserves some vestige of belief in the possibilities of society, if not of communion. It may be also one of the last remaining shreds of evidence that we are a people, and not just an isolated mass of frightened fantasists, barricaded in our homes, seeking safety from a sinister and threatening external world.” These are salient points, but they don’t go far enough. The stage serves society best when it dares to grapple, mano a mano, with pervasive “sinister and threatening” ideas and forces, especially when they are on the march. Theater is social history: it is a record of resistance and cowardice for the future.

At present, the record of Boston’s major theaters is disheartening. The Huntington Theatre Company recently announced its upcoming season. Artistic director Loretta Greco says the titles were chosen because “we were fascinated by the themes of legacy and family: where we come from, what we leave behind, and what truly matters most.” These may be superior productions, but threats in the external world are not part of “what truly matters” — the rise of authoritarianism, economic chaos, the upending of the postwar global order, Americans being ‘disappeared’ into a gulag in El Salvador, the ravaging of science research, the minimization of the climate crisis. Won’t these issues — and so many others — endanger families and their legacies moving forward? Of course, our well-heeled theater companies may know something those of us deeply concerned about what is happening don’t — worry not, this fascist-adjacent regime is but a passing fad. Perhaps future theatergoers can look forward to being entertained by a stimulating HTC staging of “What the Constitution, Sliced and Diced, Means to Me.”

On a more positive note, some New England theaters are doing more than catering to the appetites of “frightened fantasists.” I have not seen the show, but Yale Repertory Theatre is staging (through May 17) Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members. A section from the New Haven Independent review sounds promising: “In a time where an unelected Board cuts social services in the name of efficiency, and the right to self-determination and transition is steadily being whittled away, plays like Notes on Killing feel less like a scream into the void and more like a slap on the butt. This is our world. This is our fight. So what are we going to do? How are we going to hold those in power accountable?” These are the kinds of vital questions our self-proclaimed community-minded theaters should be grappling with. Over in the Berkshires, the Great Barrington Public Theater will be staging Maggie Kearnan’s satire (from June 5 to 22) How to NOT Save the World with Mr. Bezos. In this play, the second-richest individual in the world (according to Forbes) receives his just desserts. Sounds like another welcome “slap on the butt” to me.

April 30, 2025

No disrespect to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but haven’t the celebrations of its 100th anniversary gone over the top, to the point of kitsch? It’s a tip-top novel, yes, but truckloads of hoopla have been dumped into the media, both mainstream and marginal. A sampling includes the Empire State Building being illuminated in green, Gatsby-themed art exhibits, multiple annotated editions, Jazz Age soirées and cocktail events, and a party thrown by the Broadway musical version of the book. Is this about the incisive literary merit of Fitzgerald’s vision, or the obvious fact that the glamorous undercurrents of its plot can be so easily merchandised? Ironically, we are whooping up Gatsby and company at a time when we may, as in the Roaring ’20s, be stampeded off an economic cliff by a president for whom “the chief business of America is business.”

So let’s note two other classic American novels that are also celebrating their 100th birthdays. I would strongly recommend both: their compelling critiques of American class envy, blind idealism, and self-destructive materialism are just as stinging (if not more so) than Fitzgerald’s. Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is a nuanced study of middle-age ennui propelled by American acquisitiveness and superficiality. A. S. Byatt judged it to be Cather’s masterpiece: “It is almost perfectly constructed, peculiarly moving, and completely original.” Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy is a monumental achievement that took him over a decade to complete. The hulking narrative is based on a real-life murder (a 1906 “accidental” killing). Its methodical ‘true-crime’ vibes inspired Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The novel was also the basis for George Stevens’s accomplished 1951 film A Place in the Sun.

Because Dreiser is a neglected giant, a special shout-out for An American Tragedy. A trailblazing writer of the first half of the 20th century, he memorably chronicled the no-holds-barred careers and crimes of 19th-century robber barons (the Musks of their day) in his fine novels The Financier and The Titan. An American Tragedy is not as much “fun” to read as The Great Gatsby, but Dreiser’s vision of the degradations of class and the bedevilments of upward mobility stands as a far more comprehensive attack on the American dream. Gatsby gazes with hope at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Clyde Griffiths, Dreiser’s anti-hero, is crushed by the two-ton machinations of the system, his restricted possibilities on telling display when, early in the novel, he is employed as a bellhop at a fancy Chicago hotel. From the get-go, Clyde is on track to fall to the bottom of society as quickly as he climbs up.

April 23, 2025

Cultural and artistic institutions like the Kennedy Center, PCAH, NEA, and NEH, along with other national, state, and local institutions across the United States, are under attack and, though it has taken a while, their partisans are beginning to fight back. But this lackluster resistance (at least so far) has been hampered by a puzzling reluctance to name names and target the enemy, perhaps because doing so might upset powerful business and political interests. Massachusetts’ defenders of the arts insist on their vital importance to education, entertainment, economic activity, and preserving cultural heritage. All well and good, but arts and culture can also stand as dissenting bulwarks against authoritarianism. Yet a blunt assertion of this stance — a commitment to defending democracy against tyranny — is damned hard to come by. The truth is, defeating Trump and his enablers is about more than just reversing deep cuts in funding. The country is in crisis: the exercise of a free imagination is in just as much danger as the Constitution.

Weirdly, recent statements about DOGE cuts from Mass Humanities and The Boston Foundation are tightlipped about the motives driving the demolition squad. A Boston Globe opinion piece penned by Brian Boyles, executive director of Mass Humanities, dares not mention MAGA or Trump, let alone allude to the specter of his kingship. A Mass Humanities email that advises readers on “How You Can Help” says nada about the admin’s goal of controlling and/or dismantling cultural institutions. A Creative Sector Day is set for April 30, where “members of the arts and cultural community from across the commonwealth will join together at the State House to celebrate the contributions of artists, cultural organizations, creative businesses and arts workers to Massachusetts.” How about protesting the administration’s radical reshaping of the Smithsonian, an attempt to eliminate what Trump described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”? An invite to an upcoming Boston Foundation talk on The Future of Collective Action for the Arts & Culture Sector doesn’t mention the threats to creative freedom posed by oligarchy or monocracy. Instead, we are informed that this is an “unprecedented and challenging moment”. You don’t say!

The timidity can be rationalized, though not easily excused. It is fear and trembling masked by the diplomatic lingo of a cautious bureaucracy. It is the reluctance to place the arts and in any risky contexts, to stay within safe educational and economic borders. The latter is a particularly disturbing reason behind the hesitancy to speak out. In the past, assumptions of the independence of American arts and culture rested on the population’s confidence in the maintenance of democracy. Today, the ground on which creative liberty stands is being systematically undermined. Authoritarian states, such as Hungary, Turkey, and China, often fund obedient museums, theater and dance companies, music and film productions. Artists who refuse to self-censor either leave the country or struggle underground. Our cultural organizations should be about more than just demanding higher funding levels — the creative sector must call out a despotic enemy while there is still time to stop an autocratic coup.

April 16, 2025

Wonderful to see the 1958 drama The Swamp Dwellers, by the great living playwright Wole Soyinka, so well received in its off-Broadway premiere (running through April 20). Another extraordinary living dramatist, Adrienne Kennedy, recommended the script to Theater for a New Audience. I learned that in an interview the 90 year-old Nigerian writer, winner of the 1986 Novel prize for literature, had with the NYTimes. The focus was on his disappointment with what was happening in the world, from MAGA America and Gaza, not on his career as a dramatist. There is scant mention of his finest stage works, which to my mind would include The Strong Breed (1964), The Road (1965), The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), and Death and the King’s Horseman (1975).

To my knowledge, there have been no professional productions of these plays in New England. It is an embarrassment, though our record is not entirely shameful. In 1984, Yale Rep staged the world premiere of A Play of Giants, Soyinka’s satiric expose of the inanity of autocracy via a gathering of African heads of state (including Idi Amin) and their cadres of sycophants. The drama uses absurdist humor to savage how delusions of grandeur — entwined with an insatiable will-to-power — undercut civilized values, including democracy. Soyinka is prescience about how egomania, paranoia, messianic fantasy, and unpredictability drive authoritarian repression. His romp resonates with particularly stinging force in the era of Trump.

The NYTimes’s Frank Rich did not like Soyinka’s direction of his own play, but the critic’s opening rings true after four decades: “Political satire hardly exists in the American theater anymore, and when it does, it’s so mild that audiences need never run for cover. That’s why it’s uncommonly bracing to encounter A Play of Giants .. [which] spares no one in this farcical fantasy about African dictators at loose in New York.”

This script is one of a number of theatrical takedowns of megalomaniacal leaders Soyinka has written, including From Zia, With Love (1992), and King Baabu (2002), the latter a lively spoof inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Over the past two decades, Nigeria has been classified by its critics as a purported democracy, its corrupt rulers exploiting ethnic bigotry, governmental impunity, a flagrant disregard of the rule of law, and extrajudicial executions. Just this month, Soyinka protested the most recent example of presidential overreach. Given current reality, our fearful and silent stages might consider turning to — or at least being inspired by — the plays of a world-class dramatist who has diagnosed and scathingly lambasted the temperaments of anti-democratic despots.

April 9, 2025

The Trump administration is coming for arts and culture. Will it meet any opposition?

“Restrictions on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives are already directly affecting national institutions including the Smithsonian,” reports Artnet, “while other orders could lead to further challenges for artists seeking grants, sourcing materials, and looking to collaborate or exhibit across borders. Meanwhile, DOGE, helmed by Elon Musk, has made deep funding and staff cuts to key agencies that support museums and other arts initiatives.” In Massachusetts, Mass Humanities learned that its current grants with the NEH have been terminated. The result is a loss of more than $1.3M in funding, nearly 35% of its annual revenue. WBUR reports that the cuts mean that libraries across the state “are worried about how they’ll provide vital services such as interlibrary loans, e-books and access to databases.”

Individual artists are protesting, and The Theater Offensive is among the groups suing the NEA over its new draconian restrictions. But Boston’s big media and arts organizations have pretty much been mum, at least so far. Boston’s major arts groups aren’t even daring enough to carry such ‘rebellious’ banners as “Defend Democracy” or “Save Library Services” on their websites. This week the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, Diane Paulus, hosted a “virtual fireside chat at the Harvard Chan Studio about the power of shows like Waitress, Jagged Little Pill, and Night Side Songs to illuminate critical public health challenges.” Was treating the cancer of authoritarianism mentioned? Probably not. Still, Paulus must have been cautious about what she opined: Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services was no doubt monitoring the confab for mentions of fluoride.

Around this time, some arts groups announce next year’s season. I just received Lyric Stage Company’s chirpy email about what’s coming up. The troupe advises Bostonians to relax: “Live in the Moment. Let in the Joy”. Concerning its upcoming lineup: “Every story, a love letter to the human spirit.” The Trump administration is attempting to establish its own fear-leveraged version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The arts should not obey in advance by sticking their heads into the quicksand of bromidic business-as-usual.

April 2, 2025

Is it possible, in America today, to stage a drama about Gaza? In a January 2024 Los Angeles Times column, theater director Guy Ben-Ahron was pessimistic as he recalled the reaction to his 2015 Israeli Stage production (at Arts Emerson) of Ulysses on Bottles, an award-winning 2012 Israeli drama. “I knew it would shake up audiences,” he confesses, “I too was challenged by what the play brought up: Israelis’ daily indifference to the Gaza siege, which their government hoped would weaken Hamas’ rule but instead became a cruel policy of collective punishment.”

The kickback was predictable. “Reaction to the Boston production could be summed up in one comment: great art but unsettling. Tickets sold out for the majority of the run, but my theater company, Israeli Stage, lost funders and audiences. The head of Boston’s Jewish federation never came to another of our productions, and his organization reduced its sponsorship of our work. The consul general of Israel in Boston summoned me to his office and told me to put on other plays instead.” Ben-Ahron goes on to talk about how difficult it would be to produce the play here or in other countries today (given the inevitable charges of antisemitism). He also points to growing self-censorship among Israeli theater artists. “Ulysses on Bottles was the last major Israeli play to reckon with Gaza, and that was 12 years ago.”

But that silence on Gaza may not be as total as Ben-Ahron suggested over a year ago. Syrian-Palestinian Khwala Ibraheem’s one-person play A Knock on the Roof, directed and developed by Oliver Butler, has had successful runs at off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop and at London’s Royal Court Theatre, where Ibraheem’s script (which focuses on a young mother in Gaza who is rehearsing her evacuation drill, fearing an Israeli bomb will fall on her family) and performance garnered highly positive reviews. That pedigree should reassure Boston theaters working up the gumption to stage a script that meets the political/historical moment.

March 26, 2025

A recent Letter to the Editor in the NYTimes from the founding artistic director of Arizona Theater Matters.

“I run a small theater company that relies on funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. For decades, the N.E.A. has sustained organizations like mine, ensuring that theater belongs to everyone — not just those with the means to fund it themselves. The N.E.A. has stood for artistic freedom. Today, it is being held hostage.

Under federal directives, the N.E.A. has imposed restrictions. Theaters may no longer have to disavow diversity, equity and inclusion in their mission statements, but their projects still do. Productions focusing on racial justice, transgender narratives or systemic critiques are not eligible.

Small theaters cannot afford to reject N.E.A. funding. But the largest theaters in America can. Institutions with multi-million-dollar budgets and major endowments have the power to take a stand. If even one refuses funding under these restrictions, it would send a powerful message: Public arts funding must serve the whole public.

Major theaters must act before April 7, the N.E.A. deadline for Grants for Arts Projects proposals. History is watching.”

The situation is fluid: lawsuits have been filed against the N.E.A. rule changes. I asked Boston’s major regional stages if they had issued any public statements on the N.E.A. requirements. The Huntington Theatre Company: “We don’t have a public statement at this time.” The American Repertory Theater “has not issued a public statement about the guidelines”. Arts Emerson did not reply.

Some major theaters have taken public stands against the N.E.A. guidelines: Portland Center Stage, The Public Theater in New York, New York Theatre Workshop, Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut. Several theaters have already rejected or are seriously considering refusing N.E.A. funding due to the recent restrictions.

Once, Boston’s major regional stages were somewhat competitive, but over the past decade they’ve started out sending out emails recommending each other’s shows. The rich and powerful theaters now see themselves as members of a friendly club. But do these chums see themselves as pals with the broader theater community? Or are they part of a privileged class, prioritizing business as usual while quietly trimming their political sails—similar to the abject surrender of Columbia University? What do our major regional theaters truly believe in, besides maintaining their safety and status? History — and supporters of artistic freedom — are watching.

March 12, 2025

[Editor’s Note: I am speaking only for myself in this commentary, not for any others who are involved in producing the Climate Crisis Cabaret.]

Why did I help organize the Climate Crisis Cabaret? Because these are not normal times. And we need more theater like it.

But some in the Boston theater community don’t think business as usual needs to be interrupted. Or, they may think it, but aren’t willing to act because it will upset the status quo, undercut decorous social/economic arrangements. The fact is, normality itself is under threat today from both the dangers posed to democracy by the right and our inaction on mitigating the degradation of the environment. Our stages are largely ignoring these existential dangers. This neglect reflects a baffling indifference to the survival of the theater companies themselves as well as to the well-being of future generations. It also represents a retreat from theater’s responsibility to do more than supply entertainment or confirm accepted notions. For the Greeks, the stage had the civic responsibility to speak truth to (or at least dissent from) unjust power.

At the moment, an ascendant right is slicing and dicing our institutions, particularly those that deal with the climate crisis, as it marches toward what looks like an autocratic reign. This anti-democratic movement demands a strong public reaction from our theaters or, at the very least, incisive efforts to dramatize what’s at stake in the contest. What are our elemental values? Why do we hold them? What happens when we forsake them? The first tragedians would have promptly swung into poetic action. (Euripides would have loved Trump – one of his satyr comedies starred a giant, mindless, priapic bull.)

Read the rest of the commentary here

March 5, 2025

“For the first time, the federal government has hijacked what is supposed to be the nation’s premier arts institution in an effort to explicitly censor voices and viewpoints it deems undesirable,” charges Jonathan Blumhofer in his commentary on the changing of the guard at the Kennedy Center. Is it too soon to speculate about the MAGA esthetic, or at least its approach to theatrics? I think not. We saw what will be one of its essential ingredients in the (pre-planned?) televised mugging of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. President Trump characterized the embarrassing takedown as “great television”. The Kremlin agreed. It was a show of power as a spectacle of humiliation, bullying and misinformation used to mortify a weaker opponent. It may well be a precursor to what is to come once FBI honchos Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and Department of Justice head Pam Bondi hunt down the cast of characters for the (televised) political courtroom showdowns to come.

But limiting MAGA to prosecutorial drama may be too limited a way to understand the movement’s strategy for the stage. Hitler attacked “degenerate” theater, but fascist governments are not inevitably doctrinaire. I have been reading up on how theater fares under authoritarian regimes (a critic must be prepared), and I stumbled across Patricia Gaborik’s Mussolini’s Theatre: Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics. It turns out that the dictator fancied himself to be a hands-on “man of the theater”: he wrote scripts, commented on shows, personally shut down productions, including those by Pirandello. Gaborik’s fascinating study makes a surprising — but well-researched — case that Mussolini respected the art of the theater. For Il Duce, what happened on the stage strengthened the fascist cause because he saw “the art form as spiritually uplifting — not merely propagandistic and coercive.”

What does this say about the aesthetics of MAGA? Well, Trump is a self-glorifying impresario. He won’t be writing dramas, but he will have booking power over the Kennedy Center, including vetoing content. As an extension of his efforts to reshape federal institutions, Trump is interested in exerting control over cultural narratives. No doubt “spiritually uplifting” patriotic extravaganzas will be funded to divert us from the new Gilded Age, stage-managed by our tech bro-crypto robber barons. “We have to bring religion back,” Trump said at February’s National Prayer Breakfast. “We have to bring it back much stronger.” In 1899, the muscularly Christian Ben-Hur was a musical smash on Broadway and Trump’s current favorite President, the tariff-crazed, expansionist William McKinley, was in the Oval Office. We are off to the chariot races.

February 26, 2025

Donald Trump bellows that climate change is a hoax, and his cabinet is a cast of characters poised to deliver on the promise of our self-proclaimed king to ‘drill baby drill’ as he wipes out the environmental legacy of the past decade or so, ripping up whatever international climate commitments that stand in his way. Boston’s opera companies and music schools are mounting productions that sound the alarm. The city’s theater troupes are, as usual, snoozing at the switch. Until now, that is. Come to the Climate Crisis Cabaret: The Warm-Up at Arrow Street Arts on March 24 and 25. This innovative gathering will fuse the arts and climate activism through a lively mix of theatre, comedy, song, and readings that tap into the wealth of emotions stirred by the environmental crisis. Debra Wise and David Keohane are at the directorial helm; John Kuntz will be the M.C.

How can I be sure that CCC will deliver? I am one of the show’s Lead Organizers, along with Wise and dramatist Joyce Van Dyke. The idea was to gather together local stage artists — actors, writers, musicians, etc — to address the climate emergency in vibrant, innovative ways. The cabaret will be followed by a post-show conversation among performers, scientists, and activists. Also helping to get the word out about what can be done: a lobby street fair of groups engaged in environmental issues. The goal of the evening is to inspire our community to act while also encouraging more climate crisis programming from our local theaters. And there is an expectation that the “warm-up” will be the first installment in a series of cabarets on the environment that draws on the talents of Boston-area theater artists.

The Climate Crisis Cabaret: The Warm-Up is funded in part by the Puffin Foundation, with generous administrative support from Arrow Street Arts. I am not only one of the cabaret’s organizers, but a part of the show, reading Ted Hughes’ poem “How Water Began to Play” (think “water sings the blues”). It has been 50 years since I have appeared on stage; in 1976, I was cast as a doctor’s assistant in a Bowdoin College production of Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music. It was important to me to be in front of the footlights, and not only because of my apprehensions about the future of the planet. This cabaret could serve as a model for other stage efforts. Theater artists strengthening community by putting together pointed entertainments that reflect on contemporary realities, such as defending democracy. May a thousand cabarets bloom.

Check the website for info on CCC: The Warm-Up. Seating is limited in the Arrow Street Arts Studio space, so reserve your Pay-What-You-Can tickets pronto. I will be writing more on this effort — and other stage productions that meet the moment — in the weeks to come.

February 19, 2025

First, please read Jonathan Blumhofer’s splendid piece on how the arts should confront the “New Age of Anxiety” as tremors of fear spread throughout the cultural landscape. Some artists are cancelling their appearances after Trump’s hammer-and-tong takeover of the Kennedy Center, motivated by his charges that the organization hosted drag shows and somehow subsidized “Chinese Communist Party propaganda.”

The response has been more subdued, at least so far, to new NEA guidelines revised to grease the rollout of nationalistic flapdoodle. Here is how American Theater characterized the ideological mugging: “Arts organizations that apply for NEA grants in FY 2026 will be required not only to sign on to the openly regressive agenda of the new administration to roll back progress on racial and cultural diversity and trans rights, but to discontinue any programs or efforts they have in place now along those lines at the National Endowment for the Arts.”

“Each day brings new troubles and concerns,” asks Blumhofer, “how should we proceed? Ideally with boldness, though that quality seems to be in short supply, especially in the arts world.” Will local theaters find the courage to fight Trump’s attempt to kneecap democracy? Grow a spine and agitate against his authoritarian demands? Or will they serve up empowering distractions for audiences eager to escape the upheaval in the real world? Blumhofer mentions local productions of the operas of Brecht/Weill. It has been many years (decades?) since a Boston theater mounted plays in the Brechtian mode, selected dramas that proffered hard-hitting critiques of repressive economic and political powers-that-be that might upset our monied powerbrokers. Boston’s arts institutions are well poised to meet the moment, posits Blumhofer. Let’s hope they spring into action.

Reviewers, as well as artists, will be pressured to conform or collaborate. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda announced recently that he has decided to suspend his Washington Post Book World column. Among his reasons for the decision: “the new American president’s antagonistic relationship with intellectual pursuits.” Back in the ‘90s, conservatives rightfully accused liberals of “dumbing down” American culture. Now Republicans are supersizing the stupidification of a nation. Will arts critics go along to get along?

February 12, 2025

Amid Donald Trump’s tsunami of edicts, his appointment of himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., supposedly to usher in a “Golden Age” of American culture, has been met with derision or pooh-poohed. That is a mistake: there is no doubt in my mind that show trials – public drubbings of a strategically chosen lineup of ideological “internal enemies” — ‘degenerates’, radical left-wingers, DEI Advocates — are going to come. Stalin and Joe McCarthy seized on sensationalized courtroom circuses to consolidate power, gin up fear, and manipulate public opinion. Trump will garner retribution for his time in court while distracting the mainstream media with the interrogation of names culled from government and the news media. The authoritarian impresario Stalin held his theatrical beatdowns in august venues like the October Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow.

Why shouldn’t Trump – ever alert to maximum ratings impact – stage his histrionic roundups of collaborators with the “enemy from within” in the Kennedy Center?

Trump no longer has his favorite fixer, Roy Cohn, but his replacements, tech bros Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, have positioned themselves and social media to amplify the corrosive power of his carnival courts to the max. Even megalomaniacs like McCarthy and Stalin could not have dreamed how effectively technology can be wielded to spread the poison of show trials – to hyper-accelerate their miasma of misinformation, blurring the line between truth and lies.

What might our theater, if it was courageous rather than servile, do? Educate and provoke by mounting its own trials or docudramas on stage. In the past, plays have drawn on court transcripts, such as Eric Bentley’s Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been: The Investigations of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee 1947–1958 or Peter Weiss’ The Investigation. Why not imaginatively stage edited transcripts of the trials of Trump and/or his criminal entourage? Perhaps present selections from the court proceedings that involved the now pardoned January 6 insurrectionists?

In addition, produce scripts that speak to the present crisis, such as Yukio Mishima’s 1968 drama My Friend Hitler, which includes excerpts from the Fuhrer’s speeches. The plot: it is the early ‘30s and Hitler is consolidating total control with the assistance of the wealthy industrialist Gustav Krupp, who, at the end of the drama, congratulates the Fascist leader: “You cut down the left and, as you turned the sword back, you cut down the right.” Mishima’s Hitler responds: “Yes, government must take the middle road.”

February 5, 2025

Last week, I congratulated White Snake Projects for its commitment to present a “climate change-themed series of performances, conversations, initiatives, and its first community opera”. The Boston Lyric Opera should also be saluted for the world premiere (March 12 through 16) of The Seasons, an opera in which Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons will serve as connective tissue in a libretto written by Sarah Ruhl that “imagines a world whose weather is turned upside down and the impact on artists and affairs of the heart.” The production is part of an ambitious BLO season program called the Rising Waters / Rising Voices initiative, which will include, in this case, “post-show talks about climate change featuring regional experts in related fields.”

This BLO production is one way a venerable work can be re-imagined to address the climate crisis. Another strategy is to re-examine a classic through a contemporary perspective. A recent Boston Globe interview with actor and dramatist Kate Hamill suggests her revised version of Homer’s Odyssey, to be staged soon by the American Repertory Theater, will have a venerable feminist slant: “I have never believed that Penelope just sat on her hands for 20 years.” A solid idea for reenvisioning the story on stage, but “asking how we can embrace healing and forgiveness in order to end cycles of violence and revenge,” as ART publicity puts it, goes back to Aeschylus.

What would be fresher? Over the past couple of decades the Iliad and the Odyssey have been read by critics and scholars for their overlooked insights into the evolution of environmental destruction. Edith Hall’s Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World (Yale University Press) argues that “the urgency of the global ecological crisis must impel us to reassess the Homeric warriors yet again, in terms of their rapacity toward their natural environment.” The Odyssey has also been explored for how it speaks to modern ecological concerns, for how Homer’s epic links together “the abuse of nature as well as cavalier attitudes to battlefield casualties and the rape and enslavement of women.” It is time that dramatists looked back at the past through greener lenses.

January 29, 2025

When performing arts organizations have the gumption to move in an enlightened direction, particularly into areas where others fear to tread, forward-thinking critics and audiences should celebrate. “Activist opera company” White Snake Projects (WSP) recently announced its 2025 season will present “a climate change-themed series of performances, conversations, initiatives, and its first community opera. Dedicated to using the power of music theater and the arts to effect climate justice, WSP [has] designed a distinct mix of classical and contemporary music inspired by today’s climate crisis.” This commitment to bolstering “an amplified conversation with audiences to better educate, advocate, and converse about climate change” is accompanied by WSP’s pledge to “encourage both the practice of sustainability in opera, as well as to promote the adoption of a philosophy of sustainability that can be woven into every aspect of production, from libretto development to final performance.”

“Our passion for the arts and our love for the planet are not mutually exclusive,” insists WSP founder and librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs. Not everyone agrees with the pairing. There is a discouraging perception, among movers and shakers in the media and the arts, that dramas dealing with the issue turn off audiences. A blogger for “A Younger Theater” put it this way: “climate change is an anti-social subject. It is boring for people (unless you sensationalize it) – it is negative and sad. It produces fear.” Of course, there is no reason that this must be the case. Why shouldn’t WSP’s world premiere of its sci-fi opera, White Raven, Black Dove, provide inspiration and alternatives as it looks at dark realities? As always in the theater, the proof is in the pudding.

But the pudding has to be served. Up until now, Boston theaters have pretty much stayed away from the climate crisis on its stages, along with so many other crucial issues, from war and peace to growing economic inequality.

For Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater, a major regional theater dedicated to developing boffo Broadway shows, global warming is a commercial non-starter. (I am curious to see how Trump’s return will shape what pulls in big bucks on the Great White Way.) Perhaps because of their guilty consciences, many local stages are churning out shows that address issues of racial justice. It is an essential cause, but just one contributor to what historians call our current “polycrisis,” a bundle of rapid changes — environmental, technological, and societal — that are joining forces to disrupt human and planetary health. WSP’s programming decision is an invaluable reminder that our theater companies and music organizations are being called on to expand the reach of their imaginations. More on that obligation to come — watch this space.

January 15, 2025

For the third year, the magazine is honored to host the Francis Davis Jazz Poll. As the poll’s organizer extraordinaire Tom Hull writes in his introduction to the 19^th edition of the roundup, the initial version of the poll was published in 2006 at the Village Voice. It surveyed the picks of thirty New York writers. But the poll quickly went nationwide and international, ultimately moving about until it ended up at National Public Radio. Why did NPR kick the poll to the curb? Indifference to jazz? Not diverse enough? (Around 280 distinguished jazz journalists and broadcasters took part in this year’s tabulations.) Who knows and who cares? Corporate media’s loss is The Arts Fuse’s gain, which is good news for the world’s jazz lovers. There is an enormous amount of marvelous music to explore — and I guarantee discoveries for any taste.

Among its many virtues, the Francis Davis Jazz Poll is a testament to the value of critics. We need informed sensibilities eager to leapfrog beyond the white noise of PR and Spotify promotion, that look beyond big spenders bankrolling ease of access. Hull puts it this way in his piece The Nuts and Bolts: “….that a sufficient number of critics can overcome such obstacles, and find a few records that don’t have the advantages of the usual rich and famous, and lift them from obscurity to compete — not on an equal playing field, but on any one at all — suggests to me that we aren’t doing such a bad job.”

We need more arts critics, not less, which brings me to the latest local case of cultural coverage downsizing. Here is what Nina McLaughlin recently posted on Instagram:

“I’m sad to report that the Boston Globe is cutting a page of its books coverage. I found out late last week that the column I’d filed a few days before would be my last.

It’s been an honor and a joy writing about New England Literary News every week these last 8+ years. I’ve felt so lucky to be able to shine some light on the books and bookstores, the writers, the poets, the translators, the publishers, the libraries, the journals, the events that make this region so active, exciting, and rich. When I started writing it, I never could’ve anticipated how many amazing encounters it would bring, how many new friendships, how my own life would be so deeply enriched by it.”

Another castoff from the Boston Globe’s ever-shrinking arts section. As with previous reductions, I emailed the powers-of-excision at the newspaper for an explanation. There is only silence.

January 8, 2025

Critic Robert Brustein called Richard Foreman, who died at the age of 87 on January 4, “the Renaissance man of avant-garde American theater” and there is truth to that. In 1968 Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which was dedicated to putting on the over 50 shows he wrote, designed, and directed — simultaneously flaky and brainy funhouse visions that won copious Obie Awards. He also penned, designed, and directed musical works in collaboration with composer Stanley Silverman and directed scripts by a range of dramatists, from the traditional (Mozart, Molière) to modernists early (Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Büchner) and late (Kathy Acker, Botho Strauss, Vaclav Havel, Philip Glass)

For Foreman, the art of the drama should be dedicated to overturning deadening conventionality. The director expounded his artistic credo in his invaluable 1993 essay/play collection Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater: “My plays are an attempt to suggest through example that you can break open the interpretations of life that simplify and suppress the infinite range of inner human energies; that life could be lived according to a different rhythm, seen through changed eyes.” Foreman’s experimentalism dissolved “mind-forg’d manacles” in order to nurture transformation.

In 2013 I reviewed Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, the last play Foreman produced and directed himself. I noted that “an element of pathos has crept into the machinery, a sense of curdled mortality, as if Foreman is beginning to acknowledge that his mental gears are grinding down, or at least they are in search of an inspiring anima.” I am fortunate to have encountered Foreman at the peak of his theatrical powers, and not only via the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Foreman’s tinker-toyish staging of the American Repertory Theater’s 1988 production of Philip Glass’s opera The Fall of the House of Usher was a disappointment. But in 1990 I witnessed his glorious, primal scream presentation at Hartford Stage of Woyzeck, which is on my short list of most dazzling theatrical experiences ever. I remember reading, bemused, Brustein’s review of the production. He concluded that the evening was “a little bit too relentless.” Both Foreman and Büchner knew that, in the theater, it takes unyielding determination to break out of the prisonhouse of the commonplace.

January 2, 2025

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Arts Fuse’s Winter Appeal. Without your support there would be no magazine, and you came through: we made our goal and then some. I will work hard over the coming year to use these funds fruitfully, to post reviews, features, and interviews that both illuminate the arts and stimulate healthy debate. And there may be surprises to come.

Speaking of appreciation, a shout-out to critic Mark Favermann, who won a 2024 Journalism & Communications Award from the American Planning Association/ Massachusetts Chapter for his contributions, for over two decades, to The Arts Fuse and other publications. Few magazines can boast of being able to draw on the wide-ranging expertise of such a knowledgeable writer on the real world resonances of contemporary happenings in architecture, the built environment, design, and public art. For an example of his work, see Favermann’s Short Fuse about NEOM, a futuristic urban district being built by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Speaking of awards, the mainstream media details Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine, but they predictably ignore its strategies regarding the ‘weaponizing”‘ of the arts. According to the dissident Russian news magazine Meduza, Sergey Novikov, who heads Russia’s Presidential Directorate for Social Projects, is planning to use culture to airbrush Putin’s aggression: “writers are being encouraged to travel to occupied Ukrainian territories to write about ‘establishing peaceful life,’ ‘liberating cities,’ and the lives of ‘legendary combat units,’ as well as to work with young writers in Russia. Novikov also wants to create a ‘trendy glossy’ literary magazine about the war and to establish a literary prize (‘akin to the Stalin Prize’) with a Kremlin-sanctioned winner.”

Not only is there a possibility the Stalin Prize will be making a comeback, but the genocidal Soviet dictator himself has become a trendy cultural icon in Russia. The Eurasian Review reported a year ago that “more than 100 monuments to Stalin can now be found across Russia, the majority of them erected over President Vladimir Putin’s 24 years in power.” Arts and culture are playing an indispensable role in making Stalin great again, assisting to advance ‘a statist, nationalist, militarized vision of Russia that many analysts say is effectively, if not ideologically, ‘neo-Stalinist’”.

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Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.