Bill Marx
Those who think that accolades should go to the fresh or the marginal — work in Boston that could use the recognition rather than the usual suspects — will have a long wait.
Read MoreBy Bill Marx and Wen Huang Dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu lives near the epicenter of the earthquake in Sichuan province. His home is about 17 miles from the school where hundreds of students were trapped. Miraculously, his building survived, though there are several giant cracks in the concrete stairway. In his immediate area more…
Read Moreby Bill Marx A quiet but insistent source of frustration among some of the authors at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York turned out to be the amount of attention garnered by China and its brutal treatment of writers. All agreed that PEN’s petition to free imprisoned dissenting authors in the country was…
Read Moreby Bill Marx Who would have guessed that a writer who proudly earned the reputation as the Oscar the Grouch of contemporary literature would have so many loving fans? But there were few empty seats two nights ago at New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum, which hosted a PEN panel, proudly entitled “The Art of Failure,”…
Read Moreby Bill Marx I’m down in New York for PEN American’s annual Festival of International Literature, five days of readings, panels, and discussions on writing around the globe that emphasizes the plight of imperiled authors, particularly those that write in languages other than English. Chinese dissident writer Ma Jian
Read MoreBy Bill Marx “Boston is adrift in the brave new competition among big American cities vying for tourist dollars.” Maureen Dezell, WBUR Maureen made that charge back in July 2006 in an article that turned out to be one of the last posts on the late WBUR Arts Online. Now that the quote, along with…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx The Huntington Theatre Company’s Breaking Ground Festival of new play readings turns five this year. The latest lineup runs through Sunday at the shindig’s venue, the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. Scripts by Melinda Lopez, Ken Urban, Mat Smart and Nathan Louis Jackson, as well as a…
Read Moreby Bill Marx “Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.” – Sarah Ruhl NPR as well as New York theater critics think playwright Sarah Ruhl, the “Golden Ruhl” with “The Midas Touch,” is sure money in the artistic bank. A winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for…
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Theater Commentary: George Jean Nathan — The Divine Devil of American Theater Criticism
“The best of the regular theater critics … the brightest America ever had.” – Eric Bentley “Intelligent play-goer number one.” – George Bernard Shaw “The truth is that Mr. Nathan is both a theatrical storehouse, full of the most voluminous and astonishing information, and a whole theatre in himself. He maintains an impetus and lustre…
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