Posts by: Donald Brown
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the story of a Scottish nobleman’s ambition leading to his downfall; the play follows the transformation of a war hero into a murderous villain and traitor, with, to explain such an extreme change, the influence of baleful supernatural forces in the form of three witches, or “weird sisters.” The power of the [...]
Continue Reading →The final thesis show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2011-12 season finds director Alex Mihail wrestling with Anton Chekhov’s classic comedy The Seagull, much as Jacob wrestled with the Angel: I will not let thee go except thou bless me. What might Chekhov’s blessing look like? I found myself wondering about this very question [...]
Continue Reading →When I first heard Neutral Milk Hotel it was 2000 and my daughter brought the CD of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea home from college. By then, the album had been out for about two years and its composer/singer Jeff Mangum was already passing into legend as a young, quirky genius who had produced [...]
Continue Reading →In the playbill for reWilding, now showing through Saturday night at the Yale Cabaret, YSD playwrighting student Martyna Majok writes of “a rural community in North Carolina that lives in the wild.” The people she describes have their reasons for living on the edges of what most of us recognize as “civilization.” What she wants [...]
Continue Reading →Director Eric Ting of the Long Wharf set himself a considerable task this holiday season: how to defamiliarize the overly familiar? It's a Wonderful Life, the seasonal chestnut roasting on televisions all over the U.S. at Christmastime as a cinematic classic from Frank Capra starring wholesome Jimmy Stewart and winsome Donna Reed, has been re-imagined [...]
Continue Reading →We sometimes forget how much Shakespeare was a fantasist. The ghost in Hamlet, the witches and apparitions in Macbeth have become so familiar as to be normal. Even odd bits of “grand Guignol” style bloodletting—Gloucester’s eyes, anyone?—rarely meet with the shock we might otherwise experience if not somewhat inured by Shakespeare’s sublime reputation. If we [...]
Continue Reading →Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, playing for two more shows at Yale Cabaret, directed by Hallie Cooper-Novack, has the reputation of being unproduceable because many of the acts the script calls for in the second part, “The Youth Hostel,” our society generally deems, if depicted on stage or screen, “pornographic.” To the extent [...]
Continue Reading →Walking into the Yale Cabaret last night down Prospect Street from above the Divinity School after 10 p.m. and back after midnight, I didn’t see many pedestrians about. There were, however, numerous police cars—both New Haven and Yale Security—hanging about, keeping an eye on the mostly vacant streets. One could feel a bit paranoid about [...]
Continue Reading →Is there anything as polarizing as church? You either share the faith or you don’t. We may disagree about politics, food, tastes in entertainment, clothes, but none of those things are absolutes. And if we visit a friend’s family we already know we won’t belong in quite the same way as relatives do. But if we [...]
Continue Reading →Watching Amy Herzog’s Belleville is an exercise in having your worst fears about people confirmed. The play offers a fascinating interplay between two narrative arcs: the spiralling down of what might be perceived as a romantic comedy, dressed up with dramatic overtones, and the raising of sinister tensions that, like the denouement of an Ibsen [...]
Continue Reading →Archive
Tags
adaptations Athol Fugard book reviews books Charles Douthat Devin Brain Don Barkin fiction Film Reviews Gordon Edelstein gregory feeley issue #4 Issue 3 Kehler Liddell Gallery Lee Sandlin Letter Writing Lileana Blain-Cruz Listen Here Literary Criticism Literature Long Wharf Theater memoir music Musical Theater New Haven New Haven Review New Haven Theater Company Non-fiction poetry Public Readings Rudolph Delson science fiction Shirley Jackson short stories theater Theater Review Theater Reviews The Dirty Pond The Yale Cabaret William Shakespeare Writing Yale Cabaret Yale Repertory Theater Yale School of Drama Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival
Recent Comments