Bill Marx
By Bill Marx Can’t we get our unjustly neglected American playwrights right? A chance to see a marvelous, overlooked American play of the 1950s. And it is not by the prosaic William Inge. “When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means any attempt to understand the world has been given up.”…
October brings in epics from the classics (Shakespeare and Dickens), ghost stories from the classics (Poe, Henry James), a tragicomedy from a classic (O’Neill), and a comedy from a classic (Ben Jonson). Annie Baker, Ethan Coen, and the Rude Mechanicals provide some welcome respite from the tried-and-true. Given the state of the economy and the…
The novella revolves around that oxymoron of “silent voices”: Jon Fosse’s aim is to evoke the insinuating power of self-destructive forces that lie beyond our control.
By Bill Marx Steamboat Bill Jr. is my personal favorite among Buster Keaton’s classic silent comedies, and the image (above) of Buster holding an upturned umbrella (this is a publicity still—in the movie he wields the useless brolly during a rampaging storm) is one of the movie’s greatest sight gags, an indelible image of the…
It is with a strange malice/ that I distort the world. – Wallace Stevens, The Weeping Burgher Hard Headed Heart. Performed by Blair Thomas & Company. Sets, puppets, and scrolls by Blair Thomas. Translation of the Garcia Lorca play by Catherine Brown. St. James Infirmary puppets by Jess Mooney-Bullock. Curtains and costumes by Heidi Dakter…
By Bill Marx After four years in the position, Louise Kennedy is leaving her post as theater critic for the Boston Globe to work on a book project. I wish her well: she’s had to persevere as the position becomes the afterthought of a Tweet. Perhaps she sees the handwriting on the printer’s wall. Her…
The Arts Fuse began as my blog after the untimely end of NPR/WBUR Arts Online. But, as more writers and critics wanted to make their voices heard, the blog became a magazine. So, I decided to make it a New England focused magazine modeled on other pioneering efforts to cover the news online, such as…
A whole lot of deconstruction of the classics going on this month, along with productions of scripts by familiar homegrown names, from William Inge and David Mamet to Sarah Ruhl. A visit from a master puppeteer and a show about race that’s “recommended for mature audiences” look intriguing. By Bill Marx The Real Inspector Hound…
Shakespeare’s tragic characters, on the other hand, suffer from the Christian sin of pride: knowing you aren’t God, but trying to become Him—a sin of which any of us is capable. — W. H. Auden on Othello in Lectures on Shakespeare Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company…
By Bill Marx In my other life, as editor of World Books for The World, BBC/PRI’s national radio program dedicated to international news, I write and edit book reviews as well commentaries and interviews. I also host a monthly podcast dedicated to global literature, which is available through ITunes. The most recent pieces posted on…
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