Jim Kates
Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is a comedy of total narcissism — belly-laugh jokes accompanied by a cold cruelty.
Read MoreThe current revival of Laughing Stock, directed again by the playwright, has softer edges than I remember in the earlier one, played with fluidity rather than crackle.
Read MoreThe Peterborough Players have put together a “Seagull” that floats elegantly on nineteenth-century Russian and twenty-first-century American wings, simultaneously bright and dark.
Read MoreSome of the jokes in “2 Pianos 4 Hands” reach fairly deep into an understanding of how classical music works and is taught; other jokes will be recognizable to anyone who has taken piano lessons or raised a child to do so.
Read More“Say Goodnight Gracie” revels in familiarity and age. It travels on creaky wheels of recognition rather than on rockets of revelation.
Read MoreThis anthology, made up of Michael Wolfe’s superb translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, begins in prehistory and ends in the sixth century C.E.
Read MorePoet Mikhail Kuzmin, born in the 1870s into a family of Russian Old Believers, was a passionate exponent of gay literature in the early twentieth century.
Read More“Henrik Nordbrandt now holds a unique place in his homeland as its most celebrated national poet, who happens to have spent most of his adult life outside Denmark.”
Read MoreConsider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.
Read MoreIn 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
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