Bill Marx
The American Repertory Theater’s juggling/removal of the operatic elements in “Porgy and Bess” is clumsy, but the goal is to create a compelling entertainment for contemporary audiences, smoothing out the melodramatic story’s edges and cutting its length.
9/11 has inspired a number of movies and TV documentaries, but theater works about the event are rare. What are dramatists and theater companies afraid of?
Thought to be lost, the only existing print of NATHAN THE WISE was discovered in Moscow in 1996. The Coolidge Corner Theater is screening a tinted and beautifully restored version of the film, with an original score by Aaron Trant performed live by the After Quartet.
I have written another commentary for the Mass Humanities blog, The Public Humanist. It is a reaction, admiring but skeptical, to John Armstrong’s recent polemic IN SEARCH OF CIVILIZATION: REMAKING A TARNISHED IDEA.
Multiple Google searches suggest that no one is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the second of Ben Jonson’s tragedies. I don’t think I will live to see a production of CATILINE, but attention should be paid to this awkward but powerful script. Filled with moral strength, perceptive realpolitik, and rich poetry, it proffers a brilliant serio-comic meditation on political gangsterism.
In BUG, a deranged veteran fights for his “freedom” against phantoms in a hermetically sealed echo chamber that he is willing to blow up for the good of mankind. As The Tea Party would have it: Either change the government or shut it down.
A busy month of theater, especially for off-speed, postmodern romances, while old-timers such as the Gershwins and Tennessee Williams receive some attention as well.
An opportunity, via two workshops, to work with ArtsFuse Poetry Critic Daniel Bosch on making poems.
In the perceptive hands of director Joann Green Breuer, the combination of scripts (stretching from the 1940’s to the 1970’s) proffers a compelling meditation on Tennessee Williams’ exploration of women and desire, as well as some surprising spins on his classic plays.
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