Our Pop Culture Is Filled With Anger

Visceral and at times frightening narratives are running through our popular culture. We get Batman and Superman — once the extensions of our better selves — battling each other in a grim rain; the take-no-prisoners TV commentaries of Samantha Bee and John Oliver; abrasive, if clever, comics like Amy Schumer; rage and betrayal in Beyonce’s “Lemonade”; meth and degradation in “Breaking Bad”; beheadings, dragons, torture and wars for supremacy in “Game of Thrones.”

How Playwrights Do Anger

“The better playwrights are inevitably drawn more to questions than answers, but in turbulent times a God-like neutrality can seem like an abdication of responsibility. To put the matter in Yeatsian terms: Why should the best among us, our writers, lack conviction, while the worst, a tough call but let’s go with our representatives in Congress, be full of passionate intensity?”

How To Build A Theatre And Make It Successful

“Until last August, when they engaged a general management company, Ms. Nichols (who makes a part-time salary with the troupe) and Mr. Tucker (who makes a full-time salary) had been shepherding Bedlam’s rise themselves, building a board of directors and gradually hiring people to take on some of their too many tasks. Still on their wish list, among other things: a managing director.”

‘New Yorker’ Cartoonist Michael Crawford, 70

“[He] sold more than 600 cartoons and drawings to The New Yorker after William Shawn, the editor at the time, bought the first one in 1981. Like many cartoonists of a nonpolitical stripe, he was something of a sociologist – a student of habits and trends, memes and fashions, the purposes and cross-purposes of human interaction, most of which he exploited for gentle ridicule or defiant amusement.”