Bill Marx
Playwright John Hodge chooses to ignore the complexity of the dissident writer’s experience — expedience for the sake of protecting something of value from destruction, an author fighting his inner demons to live long enough to finish what he believes to be a work of art that is also an act of political defiance.
Along with its puppets and spectacle, “The Snow Queen” gives the audience a chance to become part of the action. Kids of all ages are invited to put down their electronic toys and enter a fanciful — rather than frenzied — theatrical world.
We need the humanities because we need imagination that works outside the narrow channels where the sciences succeed.
Both of these novels about social corruption should be in every Occupy Wall Street library in the country: inequality is not a matter of fate but the result of an exhausted acquiescence to subterfuge.
Essentially, Kaiser’s plaint about the vanishing critic is useless because he, and so many other cultural kingpins worried about the end of professional criticism, offer no solutions.
There was a memorial service for Caldwell Titcomb, invaluable friend of the arts in New England, yesterday in the Memorial Church at Harvard University. He passed away on June 12th of leukemia at the age of 84. The ceremony was moving and heartfelt, with memories shared about Caldwell as a friend, composer, critic, grammarian, teacher, brother, long-time President of the Elliot Norton Awards, and researcher in African-American history.
Given his full-throttle depiction of the myopia of middle class mores, Bruce Norris is more in the flamboyant satiric line of Sinclair Lewis, who also trained his sharp ear and eye on the Midwest, the American heartland, jabbing away at American delusions of community, status, and self-satisfaction.
Exciting things are happening in Israeli writing, and it is garnering considerable attention in Europe. But what about theater in Israel? Israeli Stage offers the curious a chance to see what is happening.
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