“Set in a state-run sanatorium where the so-called ‘patients’ are actually political dissidents undergoing various excruciating corrective treatments, The Hothouse shows the casual inhumanity … with a broad, over-the-top comedy. Several scenes have the rat-a-tat patter of old-school vaudeville and there’s even an exploding cigar.”
Tag: 05.08.13
It’s Hard-Wired: Humans Need Stories
“It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. Like our language instinct, a story drive – an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making – emerges untutored universally in healthy children.”
Performing Beckett’s Play For Mouth
“Samuel Beckett left strict instructions for his ‘one-mouth’ play,” Not I. “Don’t act. And you can never go fast enough. Easier said than done, writes actor Lisa Dwan.”
What Is It About Baz Luhrmann That Rubs Critics Wrong?
“Is it his love of bold, technicolour dance sequences? Perhaps it’s his penchant for melodrama and theatrical characters? Or is it because he’s not making gritty, hard-hitting films about life in the suburbs?”
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Former Leader Steps Up To Lead Again
“Bruce Coppock, a cellist, led the SPCO from 1999 to 2008, when he retired to undergo treatment for a rare cancer diagnosed two years earlier. He has been in remission since 2009. From 2011 to 2012, he was general manager of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Miami residency.”
A Five-Year Plan To Revive The Minnesota Orchestra
“As a lawyer who works in the business world, I understand the need for revenue and expenses to balance. … Yet, I have not heard management express that its goal is to maintain a world-class orchestra. … We need a five-year plan – one that will assign responsibilities on all sides to find a more stable platform for the continuation of our world-class orchestra. Management says there is a $5 million problem. For the next five years, do the following (all with new money):”
Experimental Theater Director Herbert Blau, 87
“A fiercely iconoclastic theater director, scholar and theorist who staged some of the earliest productions of Beckett, Brecht and Genet in the United States, … he is probably best remembered for starting, with Jules Irving, the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco in 1952” and for his 1964 book, The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto.
More And More US Cities (Even Fresno!) Appoint Poets Laureate
“For many poets, and those in the poetry business, the popularity of poets laureate – those who labor over words to sing a community’s virtues or plumb its psyche in an age defined by Twitter messages – is a pleasant surprise. Why now, though, remains something of a mystery.”