Category: theatre

That’s right, it’s Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. Do we need to explain? Well: “What started as a response to a Trump presidency now seems to speak to our times in many ways, with a plot that intertwines an ethically compromised antihero, political extremism, corruption, environmental activism and a lack of accountability for the destruction of a town.” There was even a site-specific play set, and performed, in Flint, Michigan.

At the center of Quiara Alegría Huedes’ Elliot trilogy of plays – Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue; Water by the Spoonful; and The Happiest Song Plays Last – is the former soldier. But Elliot isn’t someone the playwright made up out of whole cloth. Instead, he’s based on her cousin, whom she calls her muse. Sure, she changed some details, but “the fictional Elliot’s life is close enough to this young man’s that he can confidently be regarded as the Ur-Elliot, the original model, the irreducible essence of Elliot-ness from whom all other Elliots on various stages have sprung.”

Succeeding company co-founder Howard Shalwitz is Maria Manuela Goyanes, 38, who is currently director of producing and artistic planning at the Public Theater in New York City. (Public artistic director Osklar Eustis describes Goyanes as his “his producing right hand.”)

Lauren Wingenroth: “Last month, Buzzfeed News confirmed 17 instances of groping or sexual misconduct by patrons of the immersive theater show Sleep No More. Having experienced the show for the first time just a week before the story broke, I can’t say I was surprised by the accusations. … At every step of my two and a half hour journey through the show, I felt that the safety of the performers – and of the audience – was being compromised for the sake of an experience that just wasn’t worth the risk.”

The real Anne was unequivocal about the particular Jewishness of her suffering and about her perpetual otherness. She wrote, “We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or just . . . representatives of any other country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.”

“Lift: Slobodan Show premiered at a packed theatre in Gračanica, a Serb-populated town outside Kosovo’s capital of Pristina. It was performed by a local theatre group and artists from Serbia. Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority shunned the play.” Slobodan Milošević, the eponymous dictator, died in 2006 while on trial for war crimes and genocide in The Hague.

As the national dialogue around gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, disability and other factors is continually evolving, the theatrical canon is being rewritten daily. Will audiences not already in love with My Fair Lady find the relationship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle a budding romance that leads to equality between two people of different classes – or is it a document of a man moulding a woman into his ideal, for his own ends?

“Annotations in the margins of a 16th-century text that is believed to have been one of the sources for Hamlet could have been made by Shakespeare himself, according to an independent researcher. John Casson was looking through the British Library’s copy of François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, a 1576 French text thought to have been one of the sources for Shakespeare’s tragedy … [He] noticed that faded ink symbols had been made in the margins next to six passages.”