Category: people

“When Gray went for a walk last Saturday night and vanished into the streets of New York, it seemed that one hidden fantasy may have at last come true, and the monologist’s voice may have no scripts to deliver in the future. Gray’s disappearance is a startling, troubling event, and one that hopefully might still have a happy resolution.”

Hagen played Broadway stages for 50 years, and “wrote what many consider the actor’s bible on performing.” She was “particularly known for playing the brutal, braying Martha in the original production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, was as at ease with such modern playwrights as Albee, Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams as with the works of Shakespeare, Shaw or Chekhov.”

David Lennon may not be a familiar name to most theatergoers or classical music lovers, but he may be the most powerful man they’ve never heard of. Lennon is the new president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, succeeding longtime head man (and union legend) William Moriarty. 802 is New York City’s local, and as such, Lennon speaks for the workers of one of the largest professional music scenes in the world. From the Broadway pits to the New York Philharmonic, Local 802 is the final authority in which professional musicians place their trust, and the president of the local has historically been a figure of national prominence in the union.

Before the 9/11 attacks, James Lileks was just a lightweight humor columnist for a Minneapolis daily. Before the Iraq war, he was best known nationally for his quirky retro web site cataloguing the myriad horrors of food, pop culture, and interior design that the America of his youth was forced to endure. But these days, Lileks is making a name for himself as a “war blogger,” one of an increasing number of angry right-wing freelancers giving over their personal bandwidth to cheering American forces and brutally shredding anyone who dares oppose the Bush administration’s policies. Bloggers can write what they like, of course, but Dennis Perrin is concerned that Lileks and other war bloggers like him seem to consider truth secondary to bluster, and reasoned analysis inferior to blind machismo.

“It’s ironic, then, that we have no record of George Orwell’s own voice. Orwell delivered hundreds of BBC radio broadcasts during World War II, but not a whisper remains. There isn’t any film footage of him, either. We have plenty of written records of him, naturally. In fact, for last year’s centennial of Orwell’s birth, two new biographies were released – Gordon Bowker’s Inside George Orwell and D.J. Taylor’s Whitbread Prize-winning Orwell: The Life – as well as a sizable new collection of his essays.”

A crowd of muslims protested in Bombay Monday to protest Salman Rushdie’s visit to India. “The protesters, including Muslim clerics and scholars, shouted slogans such as “Hang Salman Rushdie”, “Kill Salman Rushdie” and “Expel Salman from India now”.”

“Despite Neil Simon’s stellar reputation as one of America’s funniest writers, he’s never won an Oscar and hasn’t had a bona fide big-screen hit since 1988’s ‘Biloxi Blues. ‘What they want today are action-oriented and futuristic stories. I write about families and relationships.’ There was a time when that was good enough.”

Monologist Spalding Gray has been reported missing since Saturday by his wife. “Gray had a history of depression and tried to commit suicide in 2002, The New York Times reported. Gray discusses his neuroses in his monologues and has said his mother committed suicide at the age of 52.”

Scientists plan to dig up as many as 50 members of the Medici family to study the bodies for clues to how they lived and died. “Starting from June, corpses will be removed from the monumental tombs in the Medici Chapels at Michelangelo’s church of San Lorenzo in Florence, allowing scientists to reconstruct the dynasty’s genetic make-up and their real family tree.”

Edward Albee has “written 28 plays over 44 years, but as he wrote in the programme notes for the Almeida’s 1996 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that play, premiered on Broadway in 1962, has “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous”. Among American playwrights he ranks alongside Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and like them he has suffered critical rejection.”