“At this year’s fringe, dark theatres are something of a subgenre” – with an adaptation of the Iliad acted out in complete blackness, “Don Quixote performed to a blindfolded audience and His Ghostly Heart, a new one-act drama by Skins writer Ben Schiffer, played with the lights out” and a couple in bed dimly visible.
Tag: 08.11.09
As Waves Of Change Swamp Criticism, Plays Will Endure
“Our time is an exceptionally rough one for criticism. With the dizzying changes in the way we communicate altering the whole fabric of our social life, we are going through a double revolution, and revolutions are never optimal moments for integrity and clarity of thought. The critic–whether viewed by the theater as an enemy, a necessary gadfly, a creative partner, or a poor relation to be tolerated–was never more than a small part of the picture.”
In Wealthy Orange County, Arts Groups Are Just Not Used To Recession
“Buoyed by its diversified economy and wealth, O.C. has powered through past recessions relatively damage-free. Not this time.” The financial crisis facing the arts institutions in Orange County “holds a mirror to our singular way of doing things: our maverick entrepreneurial spirit has been both a strength and a weakness for the arts in O.C. … This time around, munificent millionaires and their splashy gifts of money might not be the answer.”
New Yorker Punk’d By Pynchon-Lovin’ Rock Band
“In ‘Godzilla Meets Indie Rockers’, a Talk of the Town story from June 24, 1996, [former staffer Andrew] Essex reported that Thomas Pynchon, a notorious hermit, had become a groupie of the nineties New York rock band Lotion. … It was a great story. It was also mostly untrue.”
David Mamet To Write, Direct Anne Frank Film
“The film will be an amalgamation of the famed diary; the stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; and Mamet’s own original take on the material that could reframe the story as a young girl’s rite of passage.”
Theatre Shouldn’t Come With A Money-Back Guarantee
Taking the stage after the opening-night performance of a Collaboraction production, actor Eddie Torres told the audience that refunds were available for anyone who hadn’t enjoyed the play. The pledge was a condition of an “unusual new endeavor from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation” that’s a well-intended, very bad idea, Chris Jones writes. “[A] piece of art is not a light fixture. And I think that such a speech is beneath the dignity of a fine artist like Torres.”
Naked Onstage, Dancing At The Fringe
“For most people, dancing naked in front of a large audience is the kind of classic nightmare from which one wakes up shaken – but relieved to be safely in bed. Not so, it seems, for the 16 dauntless women, ranging in age from their early 20s to their 50s, who are kicking, leaping and windmilling over an Edinburgh stage.”
How The Recession Is Changing The Chick Lit Narrative
In the recent boom years, when “the external circumstances were steadily sunny, writers looked mostly inside their characters for the energy to drive and motivate plot. But now, those of us who write women’s fiction for mass consumption must inevitably look outward again. We are not about to turn into Gaskell and Eliot. But like the great architects of the novel, we can write stories about heroines who must take on the world, not just themselves.”
What’s This? Journalists Who Have Money To Give Away?
“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which hands out the Globes, handed out its annual round of financial grants at a luncheon on Tuesday. And the goody bag was full again. Total grants to 29 film schools and nonprofit organizations were $1,249,000, the association said, up from about $750,000 last year.”
Impromptu Synergy: London’s Plinth Hosts Readings From Man Booker Prize Nominees
“Antony Gormley’s fourth plinth project in Trafalgar Square has played host to a man dressed as a giant turd and a woman performing the Time Warp, but today it was subjected to the cream of literary fiction when a photographer took to the heights to read extracts from the 13 books longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize.”