“Of the plays we’ve singled out as the best 25 of the last 25 years — dated by their first reviews in [the newspaper] — only nine have ever appeared on Broadway, and none originated there. No matter their size, most began on, and many never left, the smaller stages of Off and Off Off Broadway, or were developed at regional theaters. If they have reached fewer people as a consequence, they have told more stories: the kind often ignored during the decades when theater was still a dominant but homogeneous cultural force.”
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How The New York Times’ Critics Chose The 25 Best American Plays Of The Past 25 Years (Plus Nods To The Ones They Left Behind)
“We started with 75. … This was encouraging; it meant we found much to love. And many of the same plays were on more than one list. That was good to recognize, too. To get to 25, we eventually realized that we could only include one play by any given playwright, or risk being overrun by a medley of Annie Bakers or Suzan-Lori Parkses. Conversely, we decided that we could not include veteran playwrights just because they wrote great plays before 1993.”
Did The Hippies Really Contribute Anything To American Culture? Yeah, Man, They Did
“The 1960s marked a coming together of politics and counterculture, reminiscent of earlier modernist movements like dada and fluxus, though on a much larger scale. The hippies and their offshoot groups, more than any other anti-establishment group at the time, integrated art and life in a way in which the two were indistinguishable – an idea that carries through to contemporary art today.”
New Clues To The Whereabouts Of Frida Kahlo’s Most Famous Lost Painting?
“The hunt for Frida Kahlo’s long-lost painting La Mesa Herida (The Wounded Table, 1940) has been revived in Mexico, where a researcher says he expects to track it down within five years. The work, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. Last seen in an exhibition in Warsaw in 1955, it disappeared on its way to Moscow.”
Andrew Garfield And Stephen Spinella Trade Emails On Playing Prior Walter In ‘Angels In America’
“Andrew Garfield, a Tony Award nominee for playing the defiant Prior Walter in the Broadway revival of Angels in America, was 9 years old in 1993, when Stephen Spinella won the first of his two Tonys in the role. As it happens, Mr. Spinella is again tackling the furious, fantastical poetry of Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour play, this time as the bilious lawyer Roy Cohn at Berkeley Repertory Theater. The New York Times asked the actors, who have never met, to correspond by email during a week’s worth of shows. … Below are edited excerpts from their exchange, which included insights on how to understand the character of Prior, a man with AIDS who accompanies an angel to heaven, and how to maintain the stamina to play him.”
The Yellow In Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ Is Fading To Olive-Brown
“A laborious x-ray scan of the painting’s canvas has discovered that Vincent van Gogh used two different types of a chrome yellow paint, one of which is more liable to degrade under light. The change in the 1889 painting, one of a series of sunflowers by Van Gogh, is so far not visible to the human eye but, over time, the painting is set to lose some of its vibrancy in the pale-yellow background and the sunflowers’ bright yellow petals and stems, where the sensitive pigment was mixed to achieve the right green hue.”
Publishing Start-Up Will Put Its Novelists On Salary
De Montfort Literature, founded by hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs alumnus Jonathan De Montfort, will offer authors a monthly salary starting at £2,000 as well as half the profits from their titles (after salary, production, and marketing costs).
The Lost Dancing Maidens Of Berlin: The Long, Strange Search For A Sculpture Looted In World War II
“Outside of art history circles, [Walter Schott’s] Drei tanzende Mädchen isn’t even particularly well known. But inside them, and especially among restitution experts, the sculpture represents a superlative example of the time, energy, money, doggedness and old-fashioned expertise required to track down a missing piece of art. And it stands as a heart-wrenching test of the limits of legal solutions to crimes in which the burden of restitution isn’t always clear.”
Hurricane Harvey Cost Houston Grand Opera $15 Million
“Houston Grand Opera has raised more than $9.5 million to offset losses caused by the flooding of the Wortham Theatre Center last August during Harvey. The company expects financial losses will total $15 million over three years, according to a report detailing information presented during HGO’s annual meeting on May 30.”
How Europe’s Oldest Language Survived Through The Millennia
“This week on the podcast [The World in Words] we talk about Basque. With more than six dialects, how did Basque develop a language standard? How did this language survive the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco when speaking, writing and reading it were illegal? How has this minority language thrived and even grown in the years since Franco’s dictatorship ended? And what does the future hold?” (audio)