Books
I asked Davis Robinson, artistic director of the Beau Jest Moving Theatre, to share his thoughts on the 100th anniversary (March 26th) of the birth of playwright Tennessee Williams.
Read MoreDirector and woman as I am, I would love to see A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, even The Rose Tattoo, cast with all men. Then I would push some courageous director to attempt to prove on stage that Williams’s final plays are not the work of a declining talent, but…
Read MoreIn the best of all possible worlds, Duncan Heining’s biography will be the cornerstone of the edifice that time will erect to the memory of George Russell and his gift to music. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. In some ways, because of the vagaries of the book business, it’s up…
Read MoreMagrelli’s is a reserved, critical intelligence, and his poems do not issue from a position of knowledge, but rather from a doubt that stands, and dances, slowly on a profound respect for ambiguity.
Read MoreUpdated — A celebratory month: Pianist Nando Michelin honors one of his native Uruguay’s greatest poets, a legendary Ethiopian vocalist rejoins the Either/Orchestra, a stellar Jazz Piano Summit comes to Connecticut, and much, much more.
Read MoreIn her second novel, Aminatta Forna gives us a moving story of the toll that the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone has taken and is still taking, years after it supposedly ended.
Read MoreGerman author Ernst Weiss’s nightmarish vision of science gone mad in his 1931 novel Georg Letham is not rote Freudian; it is firmly in the social critique/ apocalyptic Darwinian mode.
Read MoreBare chested and sweating up a storm, singer Gavin Creel as Prometheus makes for a rock rebel with lots of snarly attitude, defying Zeus’s tyranny by flexing his abs.
In The Necessity of Theater, author Paul Woodruff makes way for wisdom as theater’s final gift. In his view, theater’s wisdom lies in its use of the mask, and that mask is the sine qua non of meaning. The mask must conceal, if only to reveal. The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching…
Read MoreMoondogs comes of as an entirely fun jaunt through a foreign land that nevertheless hoped to do a bit more. Still, the promise of Alexander Yates’s first novel more than justifies picking up his second, even if it lacks villains, superheroes, and evil green roosters. Moondogs by Alexander Yates. Doubleday, 352 pages, $25.95. By Tommy…
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else