Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 08 July 2008
Richard Foreman: The Toast of Broadway?
Not quite, but it might have been. Ian W. Hill and his Gemini
CollisionWorks company will offer a production of the
once-
In 1966, [Foreman] wrote Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville, which came very close to having a Broadway run with Vincent Gardenia in the eponymous role (though Foreman had hoped for Alec Guinness in the role – that of a large, manic, Bronx-born, Jewish New Yorker, which is a hint to the creative conflicts that kept the show from being staged at that time). This "boulevard comedy," as Foreman calls it (he also compares it, accurately, to the 1960s plays of Murray Schisgal), remained unseen for over 30 years, until Foreman gave it to director/actor Ian W. Hill in 1999 ... saying that the part of Harry was a good one for Hill to play and he should do the show – which he did, to appreciative audiences and excellent reviews, for a very short run, the only run this obscure work has ever had. ...
The plot? Harry Rosenfeld is a big, neurotic, unnerved and unnerving man who believes his wife, Hilda, is planning to cheat on him (and he seems to be right). His response: drug her coffee and keep her knocked out until her paramour goes away. The plan works about as well as should be expected and, over several days, a number of people – the paramour, a doctor, Hilda's brother, and an "innocent" bystander – are sucked into Harry's manic, snowballing energy as it becomes an eventual avalanche of (hysterically funny) psychosis.
Harry in Love runs at the Brick from 31 July through 24 August. Tickets and schedule information available soon at The Brick's Web site.
Posted at 1.08 pm in /Openings
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Tuesday, 08 July 2008
Over at Praxis Theatre's Theatre is Territory blog,
several commenters are taking semi-
Most of Shakespeare's detractors here (and I exempt Gardner from this
specifically, who seems to have been more peeved by inept productions than
by the plays themselves) have it in for Shakespeare's language, his
racism, his sexism (these latter two – well, all three, I suppose
– from a contemporary perspective); and I wonder how much of it too
stems from anxiety. No dramatist worth his or her salt picks up a pen
without a deep familiarity with Shakespeare's work. Though Shakespeare
wrote his plays more than four centuries ago, the English-
Well, if some wouldn't have Shakespeare on the stage, we can always
have his work in books. The second, revised edition of The Norton Shakespeare, a new complete works
volume definitive for our generation, was published in January of this
year; this new edition explores recent developments in Shakespeare
criticism and features revised introductions to the individual plays. At a
list price of $68.75, it's still a bargain; the best series of individual
plays, the Arden Shakespeare and the New Cambridge Shakespeare, while each play
comes with a monograph-
Any of these will get you through a year or two without the Bard.
Posted at 8.36 am in /Books
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