tagged w/ plays
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"1. Despite the recent fuss over the recently “discovered” Cobbe portrait, no one is too sure what Shakespeare actually looked like: no life portrait survives, and the two most plausible likenesses, his funeral bust in Stratford and the engraving on the title page of the First Folio, were most likely done long after his death.
2. Shakespeare had a shotgun wedding. He was just 18 when he got Anne Hathaway pregnant with their first child, Susannah (she was 26), and the couple had to obtain a special licence from the Bishop of Worcester in order to get married.
3. … but the second-best bed notoriously bequeathed to Anne might, contrary to rumour, have been a touching gift instead of a bad-tempered brush-off – it was possibly the couple’s marriage bed.
4. Although Shakespeare wrote plays set in France, Scotland, Italy, Cyprus and Vienna, among many other locations, it’s entirely possible that he never left England. That may account for the most embarrassing geographical cock-up of his career: grafting a sea-coast on to land-locked Bohemia (part of the present-day Czech Republic) in The Winter’s Tale. He probably spoke French and Italian as well as Latin and Greek, though.
5. Shakespeare coined around 1,700 new English words, his most successful inventions including “addiction”, “lacklustre”, “priceless” and “mountaineer”. But not all of them stuck: among the many Shakespearean words that have passed out of use are “unsisting” (unhelpful), “immoment” (trifling), “cadent” (falling) and the frankly awful “plantage” (vegetation). Lucky escape.
6. The original ending of King Lear wasn’t performed for nearly 150 years because it was thought too upsetting. In its place was a heavy-handed adaptation by 17th-century playwright Nahum Tate, who blue-pencilled the tragic double death of Lear and his favourite daughter Cordelia. In Tate's version Lear lives out his last years in retirement, while Cordelia gets hitched to Edgar.
7. Shakespeare’s bestselling work in his lifetime was not a play, but the now little-known erotic poem Venus and Adonis, particularly popular with (male) students. It was written when London’s theatres were closed because of plague, a period when Shakespeare’s income looked like it might evaporate.
8. At least two of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio, have disappeared entirely without trace. Love’s Labour’s Won is a follow-up to his early romantic comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Cardenio is thought to have been a version of Don Quixote.
9. Given the playwright’s obsession with twins – several of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, feature them – it’s interesting to observe that Shakespeare fathered them in real life. His only son, Hamnet (the name was relatively common), died at the age of 11, but his sister Judith lived to be 77.
10. A scene from King John, starring the leading British actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was the earliest Shakespeare movie ever made (1899, no less). The most recent mainstream film adaptation is Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It (2007), although two new version of King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino are in the works.""1. Despite the recent fuss over the recently “discovered” Cobbe... more
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"In a darkened concrete room the size of a large Manhattan loft, some 200 people sit jammed together on bleachers looking at a long table and 12 empty chairs under a spotlight. They've just heard a small band in the room's corner belt out a lament in Arabic with the chorus "oh my country, my country." There's no heating in the cold, bare space, but the powerfully built lute player with waist-long hair wears only a cotton undershirt over bristling muscles and tattoos. He sports delicately plucked eyebrows. A smallish man in suit and tie appears under the spotlight inches from the audience. He addresses the bleachers: "I hugged my mother for the first time in 18 years today. We're not allowed physical contact during normal visits. Until I joined this project, I had no friends, no hope. Since age 17, I'm serving a life sentence for murder . . . " As he talks, the chairs begin to fill with men of all ages in suits and ties, two Egyptians, an Algerian, a Nigerian who speaks only English, but most are Lebanese.
At Roumieh, Lebanon's biggest penitentiary, in the mountains above Beirut, something unprecedented in the history of the country is happening. Every Sunday for four months, inmates from the all-male prison are performing a play (interspersed with their own music and personal testimonials). What's more, they're doing it in front of an audience from outside, many of them women. The play's director is a woman from outside, a noninmate. They are performing an Arabic version of Reginald Rose's "12 Angry Men," originally an American TV drama and then a famous 1957 movie, in which the characters are sequestered jurors who argue bitterly over a murder case and, after much kicking and screaming, find the defendant not guilty.
According to the director, Zayna Daccache, an energetic 30-something actress famous in Lebanon for starring in a weekly political satire show on television, "prison inmates don't have rights the way they do in the West -- in the Middle East, this kind of thing doesn't happen. But as you know, Lebanon is a crazy, contradictory place. On the one hand, it's the most open and enlightened of the Arab countries; on the other hand, it's one of the most divided and troubled."
Ms. Daccache had come up with the idea because she had worked, some years before, with an Italian director putting on Brecht plays in Italian prisons. It took Lebanese authorities eight months just to agree in principle. She had applied in tandem with her friend Ghassan Moukheiber, member of Parliament for Jounieh and founder of a nongovernmental group that works for judicial reform. His political clout won over the authorities. Then it took Ms. Daccache a year of work in the prison to put on the play.""In a darkened concrete room the size of a large Manhattan loft, some 200 people... more
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"From cinema comes the idea of the auteur: the dominant directorial figure whose individual stamp is on every frame of a piece of film. But although the cult of the auteur has been widely attacked – not least by Gore Vidal in a brilliant essay called Who Wrote the Movies? – it is now in danger of spreading to theatre. Certain creative figures are in danger of acquiring auteur status. What that means, in effect, is that their individual style and idiosyncratic signature becomes more important than the work itself.
Elevating the director to cult status at the expense of the writer is the road to Hollywood's creative bankruptcy: keep the dramatist at the heart of the creative process.
The danger of the auteur theory is twofold. It creates idols who, to their acolytes, can do no wrong. In cinema this reached the point of absurdity. The other danger is that the interpreter becomes bigger than the thing interpreted. Or, to put it more bluntly, that the director takes precedence over the writer. And, if you want an example of where that can lead, you only have to look at the sterility of post-war German theatre which is dominated by star directors and starved of great dramatists.
In cinema the elevation of the director to cult-status, and the consequent downgrading of the writer, has led, most obviously in Hollywood, to a growing sense of artistic bankruptcy. Theatre, in Britain at least, is more level-headed and still places the dramatist at the heart of the creative process. I just hope that continues and that the director is seen as a necessary interpreter rather than as an icon to be devoutly worshiped.""From cinema comes the idea of the auteur: the dominant directorial figure whose... more
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"They're called "slot plays": The Latino play, the black play, the woman play. And every season, the Denver Center Theatre Company opens up a slot — or more — to all of them.
Nobody likes the term because it implies a quota system. Some might presume that a play has been staged just to appease one target audience rather than for its value to the community as a whole. That can burden a play with lowered expectations before the curtain even rises.
"Slot plays" are a double-edged sword. They offer clear evidence of a company's ongoing commitment to underrepresented communities. They expose the mainstream audience to lesser-known writers and theatrical styles.
But slot plays can be seen as condescending to the very people they aim to attract. It happens every February when companies slot annual Black History Month plays, then forget that African- Americans exist for the rest of the year.
Of course, the alternative to slot plays is no slot plays. And that has not worked out well in the past.""They're called "slot plays": The Latino play, the black play, the... more
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"From "The Color Purple" at the Ordway to a revival of "A Raisin in the Sun" at the Guthrie Theater, stories with African-Americans at the center are taking the stage all over the Twin Cities.
But if the stars of "Raisin," "Purple" and Carlyle Brown's "Pure Confidence" could see into the darkened playhouses, they might raise a question: Where is the black audience?
"That's what I've been asking,"' said Reatha Clark King, a retired General Mills executive and one-time president of Metro State University who has been attending shows at theaters such as Penumbra and the Guthrie for decades.
"I suppose the answer is complicated, but we would like to see more people show up."
The answer is complicated. Interviews with theater patrons, artists and leaders point to a battery of reasons why blacks have been staying away from shows that should draw them, including marketing opportunities missed, a perceived lack of welcome and the economy.
All of these things have conspired to keep African-Americans away from the unprecedented surge of black writing, acting and directing talent that has been showcased at venues large and small in recent months.""From "The Color Purple" at the Ordway to a revival of "A Raisin... more
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"Anna Deavere Smith, who transformed the art of solo performance in the 1990s by embodying dozens of characters in her plays “Fires in the Mirror” and “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” is returning to the New York stage this fall for the first time in nine years with a new production about medicine and health care, “Let Me Down Easy.”
The play was originally commissioned by the Public Theater and was supposed to have its debut there in the 2005-6 season, but Ms. Smith has opted for a new Off Broadway home in New York: Second Stage Theater, where “Let Me Down Easy” is to begin previews on Sept. 15 and open in early October. The director will be Leonard Foglia, who performed similar duties on Broadway last year with the one-man show “Thurgood,” starring Laurence Fishburne.
Ms. Smith, who spent the past year refining “Let Me Down Easy” at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., said in a phone interview that the Second Stage production would be quite different in approach from the earlier productions.
“It’s a substantial revision of what I did before, focusing far more on health care than the previous productions,” Ms. Smith said. “Signs seem to suggest we will soon be in a vigorous national debate over health care. The piece not only looks at the human body as both resilient and vulnerable, but also health care as a practical part of that.” Among the characters she plays are the Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and doctors and patients whom Ms. Smith has interviewed around the country.""Anna Deavere Smith, who transformed the art of solo performance in the 1990s by... more
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"This Easter weekend, tens of thousands of Christians across the country will turn out for Passion plays, dramatic portrayals focusing on the last week of the life of Jesus Christ. Many are tiny church pageants with casts of 12 disciples, a Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps a couple of Roman centurions, all wearing bed sheets with nylon ropes tied around their waists. Others, such as the musical Tetelestai in Columbus, Ohio, and the Topeka Passion Play in Kansas, are semiprofessional events that hosting churches have perfected over the course of multiyear runs. But the most well-attended are Bible spectaculars that would make Cecil B. DeMille swoon, featuring immense casts and crews who pull off gritty depictions of first-century capital punishment and Vegas-y musical numbers.
Like The Passion of the Christ, these productions (most of which predate Mel Gibson's film) focus on the severity of Jesus' suffering in death. The moments of beating and crucifixion are sparse in the Gospel accounts, but modern Passion plays match our culture's taste for visual realism. The audience viscerally experiences each of the 39 lashes delivered onto Jesus' body and each of the four stakes driven into his limbs. Christians have long dwelled on the details of the suffering of Christ, but with today's theater techniques, nothing has to be left to the imagination.
there are also other Jesus stories to tell—including the ones Jesus shared. One famous Gospel phrase is (in the Latin Vulgate) compelle intrare, meaning "compel them to come in." The words come from a stirring parable Jesus told about a rich man who sends invitations for a fabulous dinner party, only to have no one accept. So the rich man has his servants round up "the poor and crippled and blind and lame," ending his pronouncement with a rhetorical flourish: "Compel them to come in." (St. Augustine co-opted the phrase, making it a theological basis for state-sponsored acts against heretics.)
It's Easter. Spring is here, though the calendar doesn't quite match the weather in many places. With the fast of Lent over, churches hoping to share their beliefs could take Jesus' parable as a suggestion: Throw a dinner. Make it lavish. "Go out to the highways and the hedges," as the rich man said, and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame. What kind of story would that tell?""This Easter weekend, tens of thousands of Christians across the country will... more
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"Want a glimpse of Kylie Minogue’s minidress or Mick Jagger’s jumpsuit? How about a close-up of Pete Townshend’s smashed guitar?
The Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Theatre & Performance Galleries are the place for you. They just might not be the best place for them.
The V&A closed its much-loved Covent Garden Theatre Museum in 2007, even after a campaign by such stage names as Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. It suffered from a lack of funding, with critics saying it was insufficiently promoted. Some of the dead museum’s collections have been unfortunately lumped together with rock-and-pop paraphernalia for its revival.
Why bring in popular culture?
“Because we cover all the live performing arts,” says Kate Dorney, the V&A’s curator of modern and contemporary performance. “For the same reason that we do circus or magic or puppetry, everything that happens live in front of an audience is within the remit.”
Rock-and-pop distractions aside, the strictly theater displays contain plenty of gems.""Want a glimpse of Kylie Minogue’s minidress or Mick Jagger’s... more
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"A spokesman for the Broadway production of Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty” said Sunday that the show’s producers had beefed up the security detail at the Lyceum Theater following an incident at the Saturday evening performance. During the first act the character played by Marin Ireland lights into her ex-boyfriend, played by Mr. Sadoski, with a litany of all the things she believes are wrong with him. A male audience member must have found something a bit too personal in the verbal assault because he stood, called her a bitch twice, said a few other things that cannot be printed, and stormed out of the theater. For those in attendance: No, it was not part of the show.""A spokesman for the Broadway production of Neil LaBute’s “reasons to... more
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"Wallace Shawn has a curiously bifurcated career as an incendiary playwright whose work often digs into dark, troubling subject matter, and as a popular, hard-working character actor/voice artist who specializes in playing milquetoast bumblers and sniveling schemers. Not bad for a man who never set out to be an actor in the first place. Shawn made a memorable impression as a sexual dynamo in Woody Allen’s 1979 classic Manhattan.
The son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, Wallace has worked steadily in film and television since then, most memorably in the 1981 cult My Dinner With Andre, which he co-wrote; 1987’s The Princess Bride;and 1995’s Toy Story and its sequels, which cast him as the voice of Rex the dinosaur. Shawn has also written the screenplays for adaptations of several of his plays, including Marie & Bruce, a funny, uncompromising look at a relationship in crisis starring Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick. Marie & Bruce has just been released on DVD.""Wallace Shawn has a curiously bifurcated career as an incendiary playwright... more
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"If Russia is worried about its identity abroad, it could spend less time on the defensive and more time promoting its rich cultural heritage. There is a vast multitude of "lost" Russian classics. Not lost to Russians, but lost to the west – or, to put it another way, ripe for rediscovery. We know about Chekhov; the occasional Gorky or Ostrovsky makes it to British stages. But only a select few plays by these writers are ever staged in the UK: Ostrovsky was writing prolifically for over 40 years, but British audiences usually only see The Storm, flippantly omitting all of his other work.
What is remarkable about the Russian classics, other than the sheer quantity of them, is the vast difference of style. While Russian playwriting only spans a short period – some 200 years – the writing is surprisingly varied. This isn't just a question of genre: Russian classics were responding to shifting political systems. So the fundamentals of playwriting were also changing: who the plays were written for and why they were written.""If Russia is worried about its identity abroad, it could spend less time on the... more
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Louise Kennedy writes, "I came to a shocking realization the other day: Apparently, I can't be shocked anymore.
Or at least I can't be shocked by any play that bills itself as shocking. I can be irritated, titillated, insulted, or annoyed; more often than anything else, I can be bored. But shocked? No.
These are just a few, relatively well-known examples of the kind of play that I've learned to anticipate with a weary sigh. The more I hear that a play is full of startling revelations, daring honesty, fearless confrontations with hard truths, the more I dread what I'll be seeing onstage. I do try to lay aside my dread, not least because I believe absolutely in reviewing the play, not the hype, but also because I always hope for a real theatrical experience in the theater. Too often, however, I find that the advance word is only building on the hyped-up contents of the play itself; the playwright, not the publicist, is the one imagining that he's shocking the bourgeoisie rather than trotting out old tropes and twists we've seen too many times before.
The thing is, I want to be genuinely shocked. I want plays that shine a light into the darkest recesses of the human soul, that lead the audience on a journey that leaves us breathless and invigorated even if we've been terrified and deeply shaken by what we've seen. At their best (and leaving aside their misogyny for another day), Sam Shepard and David Mamet can do this. I'm also delighted by outrageousness of the most graphic sort - Ryan Landry's deliriously blood-spattered, giddy, and weirdly moving "Medea" comes to mind, along with the flawed but incisive dark satire of Bruce Norris's "The Pain and the Itch," now at Company One - as long as it treats me as an equal, a grownup with a sense of humor, rather than as some stick figure who needs to be shaken out of her imagined complacency.
For my money, if you want real shock, it's hard to do better than Shakespeare and the Greeks. There's no shortage of gore - gouged eyes, murdered children, homicide, suicide, patricide - but the gore always means something. And - crucially, I think - the action unfolds in language, more than in elaborate visual effects. Heck, the Greeks don't even let anyone get killed onstage; we just hear about it afterward, in some of the most powerful stage speech you'll find anywhere."Louise Kennedy writes, "I came to a shocking realization the other day:... more
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"Mike Daisey is an acclaimed and brazenly outspoken storyteller who mightily stirred the National Performing Arts Convention's pot last summer when he delivered his blunt monologue "How Theater Failed America" here in Denver.
He's returning to perform "Monopoly!" for Colorado Springs' TheatreWorks from Wednesday through March 29. Here's our Q&A:
Denver Post: People are always quoting to me from your "How Theater Failed America." Can you summarize your premise?
Mike Daisey: The principal argument is that the theatrical establishment in America has lost sight of the values that led to the establishment of regional theaters, and in its place are institutions that value buildings over artists, isolation over engagement and corporate growth over artistic development.
On top and in part because of this is a shrinking and aging audience base, which has led to an art form in contraction, with less and less audience every year. We pay artists and workers starvation wages and make it impossible for a national theater to take root here, while at the same time engaging in orgies of building construction that defy logic or sense.
We have forgotten that the play's the thing — the show attempts to illustrate that with stories from my years working in theaters across the country, and tries to shake us from our slumber."
Read the rest of the interview at the link."Mike Daisey is an acclaimed and brazenly outspoken storyteller who mightily... more
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"The dearth of blush-inducing signage around Times Square will soon be rectified when the Sarah Ruhl play “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)” comes to Broadway in the fall. Lincoln Center Theater announced that it would present Ms. Ruhl’s play, about a group of women in a New York spa town in the late 1800s, at a Shubert Theater to be announced. Les Waters, who directed the play at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California will also direct the Broadway production. Previews are scheduled to begin on Oct. 22, and the play’s opening is scheduled for Nov. 19. Lincoln Center Theater said it would also present “Broke-ology,” a new play by Nathan Louis Jackson, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater; previews are to begin on Sept. 10 with an opening planned for Oct. 5. No casting was announced for either play.""The dearth of blush-inducing signage around Times Square will soon be rectified... more
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"Dr John Casson claims to have unearthed Shakespeare's first published poem, the Phaeton sonnet, his first comedy, Mucedorus, and his first tragedies, Locrine and Arden of Faversham.
He also explores the plays Thomas of Woodstock and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and claims to prove that a 'lost play' called Cardenio is a genuine work by Shakespeare and fellow playwright John Fletcher.
He has published his findings in a book, titled 'Enter Pursued by a Bear.'
"Some people have said, 'we don't know if this is by William Shakespeare', so I've been able to study them and say 'yes, here's the evidence for Shakespeare but here's also the evidence for Neville,' so I've been able to link the two," Dr Casson said.
"I started off looking at works where we weren't sure whether they were by Shakespeare or not and I tested them to see if there was any evidence for Henry Neville.
"I've found evidence pouring out and I've been able to show Shakespeare's development from his early days."
He added: "What we thought were the first plays by Shakespeare appeared anonymously in the early 1590s.
"It is inconceivable, however, that his first plays were the massive trilogy of Henry VI. Writers develop over time from simpler beginnings."
Dr Casson claims to have discovered the pseudonym 'Phaeton' in a sonnet, which he believes is the earliest pen name used by Shakespeare.""Dr John Casson claims to have unearthed Shakespeare's first published poem,... more
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Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of common people in ``The Trip to Bountiful,'' ``Tender Mercies'' and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' died Wednesday in Connecticut, Paul Marte, a spokesman for Hartford Stage, said. He was 92.Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of... more
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By now, it's pretty obvious that Campbell Scott has a knack for playing charming bastards. But where the literary ambitions of Roger Swanson, the character he portrayed in ROGER DODGER, didn't extend much beyond the scrawling of a lover's backdoor sexual preferences in lipstick on a mirror, in THE ATHEIST -- the new Ronan Noone play currently running through January 4 at New York's Barrow Street Theatre -- he steps into the shoes of one Augustine Early, a man whose passion for the written word is both matched by a certain, ruthless ambition and contrasted by a disdain for a Supreme Being. We met up with Scott prior to performance, and had a chance to discuss both the nature of Early's soul and the appeal of the stage.
In a break with recent postings, this interview was shot with my regular, prosumer camcorder, rather than a Flip-style unit.By now, it's pretty obvious that Campbell Scott has a knack for playing charming... more
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Joe Hanson is in New York City to try and make it on Broadway. In this Joe Gets... pod follow along as he takes an audition for a role in the Tony Award winning production Avenue Q.Joe Hanson is in New York City to try and make it on Broadway. In this Joe Gets... pod... more
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http://game-cheats-for.free.bg/map.htmlIn addition dedicated drinking games differently depending on the play games online... more
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REAL& FAKE INDIANS - a novel by Charleen Touchette and S. Barry Paisner with cover by Edgar Heap of Birds wins 2006 First Chapter Award Honorable Mention.
On ALBUQUERQUE BLUES by Jacques Paisner, TouchArt Books 2007
"...Poised with all of the humor and heartbreak of the modern day twenty-something stylist, this book is an exceptional new exploration into the mind of a writer who we are sure to hear more from in the future." from Strand Bookstore, NY, NY
REAL& FAKE INDIANS - a novel by Charleen Touchette and S. Barry Paisner with cover... more
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