Bill Marx

Theater Commentary: Stages Search for a New Balance

August 1, 2009
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By Bill Marx Kate Warner, the New Rep’s new Artistic Director, wants to strike a new balance. WGBH’s Jared Bowen is more of a publicist/fan than a journalist, but his recent “Greater Boston” interview with Kate Warner, the new Artistic Director of the New Repertory Theatre, gives the honcho a chance to talk about some…

World Books Update

July 28, 2009
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By Bill Marx Two more reviews posted on my World Books page at PRI’s The World.

Theater Review: “After the Quake” at Company One

July 20, 2009
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An elegant and sleek meditation on the reverberations of trauma adapted for the stage from a collection of stories by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. After the Quake, based on the stories “Honey Pie” and Super-frog Saves Tokyo” by Haruki Murakami, which were translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin. Adapted for the stage by Frank…

World Books Update

July 17, 2009
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By Bill Marx You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is. Two more pieces on international fiction for World Books, the feature I edit for PRI’s The World.

Theater Commentary: Last of the Red Hot Anachronisms

July 11, 2009
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By Bill Marx If the age turns away from the theater, in which it is no longer interested, that is because the theater has ceased to represent it. It no longer hopes to be provided by the theater with myths on which it can sustain itself. –- Antonin Artaud

World Books Update

July 4, 2009
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By Bill Marx I am juggling editing and writing duties between two blogs, theartsfuse and World Books for the website of BBC/PRI’s radio program The World, which is produced at WGBH in Boston. The section aims to be a critical conversation made up of reviews, commentaries, interviews, podcasts, and news stories about international literature. Respected…

Theater Review: Of Sex, Death, and Ducks

June 16, 2009
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By Bill Marx Let us hob-and-nob with Death — Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Duck Variations by David Mamet. Directed by Marcus Stern. Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet. Directed by Paul Stacey. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA, through June 28. Death be not mentioned in David Mamet’s…

Book Feature: Poet Liao Yiwu — Memories of the Tiananmen Square “Massacre”

May 29, 2009
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June 3 marks the 20th anniversary of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen student movement. To mark the occasion, here is the story behind Massacre, an epic poem about the violence that landed its author in jail.

World Books Interview: Daddy Colossus

May 28, 2009
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By Bill Marx Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility. Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal…

World Books: Digging “The Foundation Pit”

May 27, 2009
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By Bill Marx In the latest World Books podcast I talk to Robert Chandler, who along with his wife Elizabeth and Olga Meerson has translated Andrey Platonov’s novel “The Foundation Pit” for New York Review Books.

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