Category: theatre

Jones is 80, and Vanessa Redgrave recently turned 73, but they’re motoring on in a revival of “Driving Miss Daisy.” What makes these actors tick? (Hint: Politics, and love of the craft.)

“These men who are monstrous, so to speak, are enormously, enormously rewarding to play — much more so than a good man,” Frank Langella says. Not that there aren’t rewards to playing heroes. “But there’s so much more that you can draw on when you play a man who’s complicated, difficult and downright mean.”

Other labor groups fall in to support Occupy Wall Street, but the protest movement may go without official performer group endorsements. (Who will provide entertainment at the encampments?)

“Contrary to popular myth, drama critics don’t salivate at the chance to savage a playwright’s work. It’s still less appealing to continue doing so, year in and year out. Who wants to be cast as the playground bully who won’t leave the poor kid alone?”

Mike Daisey, writer and performer of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, now running at New York’s Public Theater, “performs his works extemporaneously, rather than with a prepared script … [He does] not plan to add a new scene or epilogue but rather infuse the entire work with perspectives about the capacity of Mr. Jobs’s influence to continue, even in death.”

Julia Pascal, who was the first woman to direct a play at England’s National Theatre, recently suggested that the only way to get the country’s stages to offer more good roles for actresses is to convince Arts Council England to require it. Lalayn Baluch – and readers – wonder if Pascal has a point?

“The impoverished repertory system can no longer sustain companies or even in most cases casts of more than five or six per play. Paid employment in the form of small TV parts or commercials, or even the glittering gem of a job in the fringe on expenses or even less can hardly give these highly trained equivalents of racehorses the sort of gallop they need.”

“The Royal Court, perhaps? The Bush? The National? … In fact it’s none of these. The title is held by a pub theatre in the West End of Glasgow – Òran Mór – which this year alone premieres 37 new plays in full productions under the banner of ‘A Play, a Pie and a Pint’.”

Sure, it’s the genius of the horse puppets and the spectacle of the onstage tank. But Michael Billington suggests that there’s more: “I suspect it’s also to do with the way it taps into folk memories of the first world war” as well as the “potent myth … of a human’s passionate love for a horse.”

Having recently seen an adaptation of Aristotle’s Poetics and a play consisting entirely of Eugene O’Neill’s stage directions – and remembering a musical version of Das Kapital and the Wooster Group’s penchant for mash-ups of classic drama and B-movies – Alexis Soloski asks readers to suggest other unlikely candidates for the stage.