- Arts Archive

<< Previous Page | 1 | ... | 9 | 10 | 11 | ... | 103 | ... | 206 | ... | 309 | ... | 412 | ... | 414 | Next Page >> 181 - 200 of 8263

Article

The Batshit Genius of Michael Kupperman; L'il Abner's Al Capp Gets a Bio at Last

No exaggeration: I coughed hot soup out of my nose while reading the new hardbound volume of deadpan dadaist Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle (Fantagraphics; $24.99). The strip that did it was one of the book's last, an alt-historical...

by Alan Scherstuhl on March 20, 2013
Article

Saga: On Thin Ice - Wakka Wakka's puppets deal with Iceland's banking crisis

New York audiences are well accustomed to seeing nudity on the stage, but witnessing a man's junk ripen into a rock-solid boner has got to be a first. Before incriminating the Baruch Performing Arts Center for endorsing public lewdness, it should be...

by Angela Ashman on March 20, 2013
Article

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards Review: How to Become a Person

What happens when F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson? Welcome to Kristopher Jansma's debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, a literary fun house that follows an unreliable narrator on his quest to write the next Great American Novel. T...

by Emily Gogolak on March 20, 2013
Article

Sink into Ragnar Kjartansson's Soggy Serenade - Enter The Visitors' surround-sound solace

Although the band broke up three decades ago, Abba continues to reverberate across cultural frontiers. Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has cribbed the title of the Swedish pop giants' final album, The Visitors, recorded when the foursome was dis...

by R. C. Baker on March 13, 2013
Article

A Scan of Ann - As Texas governor Ann Richards, Holland Taylor rules

For Ann Richards, a Depression kid who rose to become an outspokenly liberal Democratic governor of Texas, everything in life was a challenge by which she refused to be fazed. A whip-smart woman with an epigrammatic, country-accented tongue and a no...

by Michael Feingold on March 13, 2013
Article

The (*) Inn: Do Not Disturb - Target Margin checks in to Yiddish theater revival

Target Margin, the experimental theater company led by artistic director David Herskovits, never takes the easier route when a twistier one presents itself. Take the title of its latest work, a translation of Peretz Hirschbein's Yiddish play Di Pust...

by Alexis Soloski on March 13, 2013
Article

The Old Boy: A Straight Prep's Gay Breakthrough - A revealing look at the not-as-good days

Sometimes a play's very datedness becomes reason enough to revisit it--and to be heartened to live in world where that play's concerns now seem almost foreign. A.R. Gurney penned The Old Boy in 1991, a time when it was an act of bravery for a candid...

by Alan Scherstuhl on March 13, 2013
Article

Pocahontas, and/or America: Going Native - Little Lord studies up on Pocahontas

The stories found in our history books aren't always exactly true. Little Lord's Pocahontas, and/or America, currently at the Bushwick Starr, uses the famous colonial story of the feisty Native American princess to illustrate the misconceptions our ...

by Eric Sundermann on March 13, 2013
Article

The Flick and Talley's Folly Meet New People - Two plays make introductions

A quote I often find myself recalling comes from the sociologist Erving Goffman: "Nothing exists like another person for bringing alive the world within oneself." Goffman, whose writings greatly influenced some key theater figures of the 1960s, incl...

by Michael Feingold on March 13, 2013
Article

Detroit '67: Get Ready - Dominique Morisseau's Play mingles city riots and sibling rivalry

For a comedy-drama about an African-American brother and sister trying to run an after-hours joint out of their basement, Dominique Morisseau's Detroit '67, at the Public Theater, requires a surprising amount of stage blood. Every scene takes place ...

by Alexis Soloski on March 13, 2013
Article

Neva: Sunday Bloody Sunday - Guillermo Caldern does Chekhov, revolution, and tuberculosis

What to do when your husband is dead, a revolution is raging in the streets--and your new monologue just isn't working? In Neva--written and directed by Chilean playwright Guillermo Caldern, and now playing at the Public--we travel to politically t...

by Miriam Felton-Dansky on March 13, 2013
Article

Old Hats Doesn't Make Clowning New--But Does Make It Excellent. - Boys being clowns being boys

It can't be a coincidence that "one-upmanship" has that "man" right in the middle of it, can it? Guys' hopeless need to trump each other powers the bravura (bro-vura?) comedy of Bill Irwin and David Shiner's Old Hats, a vaudevillian lark that's all ...

by Alan Scherstuhl on March 6, 2013
Article

Liz Magic Laser Assumes the (Poll) Position - Mad as hell, and shilling brilliantly for the Armory art fair

The improbably named Liz Magic Laser (yes, that really is her name) is a 21st-century Paddy Chayefsky. A hugely talented, unlikely 31-year-old art star who became famous in 2011 for staging I Feel Your Pain--a piece of interactive theater combining ...

by Christian Viveros-Faune on March 6, 2013
Article

The North Pool: Class Struggle - For Rajiv Joseph, It's the Principal of the Thing

To glimpse Donyale Werle's set for Rajiv Joseph's The North Pool at the Vineyard is to return to the futility, pettiness, and misery of high school. (And I actually liked my high school.) Joseph locates this contrived two-hander in the office of Vic...

by Alexis Soloski on March 6, 2013
Article

Passion and Cinderella Try Opposite Approaches to the Musical;Belleville Tries One's Patience - Rules and deregulations

Art is unjust. Its first rule is that there are no rules, and its second is that, if you don't have some to follow while you're creating it, a royal mess will probably result. This week, two new editions of old musicals are cases in point. One sets ...

by Michael Feingold on March 6, 2013
Article

Henry IV, Part 1: Big Fat Questions - The Pearl plays Shakespeare's history.

Everybody loves Falstaff. The rotund knight--his appetite for life as large as his corpulent body, his respect for truth and conventional morality as small as his desire to pay his bar tab--is one of Shakespeare's best-beloved creations. He's so viv...

by Jacob Gallagher-Ross on March 6, 2013
Article

Lucy Loves Me: Playing Chicken - Migdalia Cruz has some 'splaining to do

In the opening scene of Lucy Loves Me, at INTAR Theatre, Milton (Gerardo Rodriguez, deliciously perverse) a bachelor in a robe, wrings a bleeding chicken into the bathtub. Then, stripping to a thong, Milton spread-eagles over the tub and mimes inter...

by Diana Clarke on March 6, 2013
Article

Jackie: First Lady Problems - The Women's Project stages American premiere of Nobel winner's play

She clambers up through a trap door, emerging onstage with a collection of tatty faceless dummies in tow. They're swathed in duct tape, and names are stenciled on their chests: One is John (her first husband), another Bobby (his brother), and a third...

by Miriam Felton-Dansky on March 6, 2013
Article

Trevor Pounds Its Chest - A new play from Nick Jones gets at the frustrations we all face every day.

We get ourselves through the monotony of daily life however we can. The stories told about high-school football are filled with bigger hits. The memory of our first kiss tastes a bit sweeter. We lie to ourselves simply because it's often just easier ...

by Eric Sundermann on March 6, 2013
Article

Q&A;: Jessica Francis Kane Talks This Close and How Kindles Aren't Dumb

"Authors are just notoriously difficult," says the publicity director in Jessica Francis Kane's story "How to Become a Publicist" from her 2002 collection Bending Heaven. While this might be true of some writers, we can't imagine anyone saying it of ...

by Angela Ashman on March 6, 2013