Bill Marx
“Bernard Malamud is the great sentence-maker, the great craftsman, and the sheer quality of those sentences has never perhaps been given its complete due.”
Jiri Fiedler’s was a life of quiet heroism dedicated to the indispensable task of keeping the past alive.
In “The Flick,” Annie Baker creates youngish characters that my students at Boston University would call “relatable,” exploring how self-delusions, stereotypes, and fear keep them from connecting in a meaningful way.
A lack of dramatic combustion sometimes makes the Lyric Stage Company production, despite its intelligent detail, more staidly melodramatic than it should be.
“Witness Uganda” is a quintessential American musical — a work of cultural tourism that condemns cultural tourism.
The protagonist may necessarily be passive in the face of his or her diminishing mental condition, but art must rage against the dying of the light.
The “Cambridge Jonson” volumes are available online, and the site is a bibliographical joy to behold, Ben Jonson’s plays, poems, masques, and prose arranged in chronological order and in a searchable format.
Those willing to accept that powerful political theater can be as much about depicting pain as providing hope will find much to admire in this visually striking, dramatically compelling piece.
“Venus in Fur” could be best described as cheeky rather than kinky, more of a talky intellectual exercise than a zesty exploration of the allure of sexual domination and submission.
CriticIsm Commentary: The Welcome Buccaneers of Arts Criticism
“Criticism will always have the force of the child in the story about the emperor’s new clothes, because there will always be naked emperors who everybody says are wearing today’s Crown Jewels.” — Eric Bentley
Read More about CriticIsm Commentary: The Welcome Buccaneers of Arts Criticism