The Austrian playwright and novelist wrote a new play (“an attack on the Trump aesthetic: the gold, the plush furniture”) for the times. It’s coming to NY, and here’s the description, from the play’s translator: “This seer with bleeding eyes sends Trump through a shattered looking glass where Jelinek examines him through the distorted mirrors of the heroes of Western culture: from Oedipus to Abraham, Isaac and Jesus, to Martin Heidegger, who attempted to lead the Führer.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
People In Theatre Say They Can’t Talk About Mental Health Issues, Or They’ll Lose Work
One director says that “The industry needs to begin addressing it very seriously, so that we all have decent guidelines, and so that performers who do have a history of mental health issues and may enter a crisis during the time they’re spending with you have some recourse.”
The Eerie Perfection Of ‘Annie’
A theory about why the 1982 movie, which is considered “bad” by most film critics, fascinates and educates young children, even though the themes are hardly childlike: “The possibility of being a single being, alone in the world, was deeply fascinating to me. Annie, the protagonist of the film, makes hard decisions several times in the movie. She’s the moral center of a film that is deeply, complicatedly female driven.”
Robin O’Hara, Producer Of Independent Video And Film, Has Died At 62
O’Hara, who produced (with her partner Scott Macaulay) the indie film “What Happened Was … ,” got her start as a producer at the experimental space the Kitchen, where she had been an intern, helping distribute videos by Nam June Paik, Robert Wilson and Bill Viola to galleries and museums around the world.
New Shows Prove That The Resolution Of A Mystery Doesn’t Need To Come Quickly – Or At All
The extension of a cliffhanger across seasons isn’t new, but the almost suspended suspense is. For shows like Big Little Lies, “their cliffhangers involve not so much people hanging off mountains as they involve people simply hanging out. They are in no rush. Their mysteries dangle, languorously. Tension is created, and then, instead of being satisfied, it … extends, episode after episode, building and heightening.”
The Africa Center Is Finished, But It Can’t Open Its Doors Without A Lot More Money
With a new board president, the former Museum for African Art is also pitching a new simulation of what it will look like inside – if it can raise the money.
Feminist Science Fiction Writers Predicted This Future (And Far Bleaker Ones As Well)
“What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible. In fact, everything – like the stratagem of the handmaids – has happened somewhere before. Everything in it has been praised by someone as the right, the good, the best, the only way to live.”
Will Hollywood’s Writers Strike Again?
The Writers’ Guild of America has asked its members to authorize a strike, but that doesn’t mean one will happen. “The move came after what the committee described as an “unacceptable” series of ‘noes’ from AMPTP studio negotiators over the last two weeks of talks about a new three-year deal.”
The Man Who Discovered That Hemingway Spied For The Soviets
“I was a traditional product of the Cold War. … There was little sympathy for Communism in our house. So I felt like le Carré’s character George Smiley, who learns of yet another betrayal: I felt like I had taken an elbow deep in the gut.”
Do The Blues Still Stand For Authenticity? A British Novelist Wants To Know
Hari Kunzru takes a road trip through the Deep South to figure it out. “It is extraordinary music, if you can really hear it. I’ve been making playlists of songs originally recorded on 78rpm shellac discs in the years before the second world war, songs that sounded like the work of ghosts. The voices of the old singers were distant in time, muffled by crackle and hiss, and yet somehow immediate.”