Category: people

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who chairs the Yale School of Drama playwriting program, will spend the semester working “on a new play commissioned by Yale Rep through the Yale Center for New Theater.” Doug Wright will join the school as a lecturer.

Meet David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States.

“But you know my parents had a restaurant, I was always in it. It was a neighbourhood restaurant, not like an elegant restaurant – but a place where life happens, and couples have love affairs and fights. Many people, I saw many people there, I don’t have to look at my parents.” (from an extended 2001 interview)

“Dixon already was a seven-year broadcast veteran in 1946 when he became a host on the classical station KFAC. It remained his home for the next 40 years. Fired from KFAC by its new owners along with other hosts in early 1987, Dixon presided over a nighttime classical music program at KUSC from 1987 to 1988 before moving to KKGO-FM … When he retired in 1998 at 82, Dixon was known as the Southland’s longest-running radio host.”

Appointed director of the Morgan Library in 1969, he “made a number of highly important acquisitions” and “extended its reach in several areas, notably music and children’s literature. In 1987, Mr. Ryskamp became director of the Frick, where he was an animating presence, increasing the number of exhibitions and broadening their scope.”

In an appearance on the long-running BBC radio program Desert Island Discs, the actress and screenwriter “talks candidly about her battle with depression during the split from her first husband, Kenneth Branagh, and reveals her continued efforts to escape the critical ‘voices in her head’.”

Oh dear. Last week, Esquire published a brief work of fiction by James Franco, who is (not without reason) better known as a movie star. As if the abuse this story has received at the hands of the blogosphere weren’t enough, Vanity Fair has subjected Franco’s prose to some statistical analysis.

“Ms. Havoc took strong exception to ‘Gypsy’ and wrote three well-received memoirs to make her point. She resented how ‘Gypsy’ made her mother seem abrasive but ultimately good-hearted,” and she “was aghast at how the show appeared to demote her to a secondary character when she was in fact the high-kicking star of the act.”

On the eve of his first European solo show (opening March 31 in London), Cambodian painter/collage artist Leang Seckon talks about his early childhood amidst Nixon’s secret bombing, his adolescence as a buffalo boy during Pol Pot’s regime, and making his way as an artist under his nation’s all-too-imperfect semi-democratic government.

The surgery took place earlier this month to remove a cancerous polyp from his colon. “Domingo returned to Los Angeles on Thursday to resume his role as director of the Los Angeles Opera Company. He told reporters he planned to begin rehearsals shortly for his next show in Italy in April.”