Essays about Culture Page 217

Imagine a musical in which the hero lies trapped underground, howling and whimpering toward his imminent, macabre death. Writer and director Tina Landau did. The result is Floyd Collins, based on the real-life 1925 tragedy of a Kentucky spelunker who died 16 days after a boulder pinioned him 50 feet below ground. Landau’s Floyd Collins…

Billie Whitelaw, Beckett’s preeminent actor, has just demonstrated the dazzling difference between reading his Play realistically and reading it the way Beckett wanted it done-without what he called color,” and at tongue-tying, lung-collapsing speed. A puzzled theatre student in the room at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. asks, “But how would anybody know…

President Clinton made good on his intention to revitalize the dormant President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities by appointing Ellen McCulloch-Lovell executive director in early February. McCulloch-Lovell, former chief of staff for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and former executive director of the Vermont Council on the Arts, will head a committee – unnamed at…

1. The audience. I like to go to the theatre as much for the audience as for the experience of the play. I am as moved by the concordance of individuals, sitting quietly and facing in the same direction, listening, as I am by the energy coming off of the stage. When I write a…

Coming to Warsaw for the first International Conference on Jewish Theatre in Poland is a sure way of conjuring up Jewish spirits from the past, ancestors only imagined, pictures in the mind’s eye of Sholom Aleichem fiddlers on roofs and Chagall floating horses and lovers. Music is in the air, so to speak; a range…

Ronald Reagan, miraculously recuperated from an assassination attempt, was gearing up his second Presidential campaign – against a Democratic ticket with a woman, no less, in the V.P. slot. Los Angeles was sprucing up for a XXIIIrd Olympiad summer extravaganza. Glengarry Glen Ross was a gleam in the Pulitzer committee’s eye, but The Real Thing…

In November 1991, after a near-lethal fall from a fifth-story window ruptured his aorta and damaged his spinal cord, actor Rene Moreno withdrew to his family’s Dallas home. For one bleak year, he mourned the loss of the use of his legs and a busy, well-regarded acting career. By December 1993, however, thanks to therapy…

There’s a character in The Grace of Mary Traverse, the 1985 play that helped bring Timberlake Wertenbaker to the public eye, who neatly prefigures the themes that repeat and recur in varying forms throughout the playwright’s later works. The character’s name is Mrs. Temptwell, and she gleefully, maliciously and single-mindedly leads young Mary through a…

For 10 weeks, apprentice director Richard Eoin Nash observed rehearsals for auteur writer, director and designer Richard Foreman’s latest experimental theatre work, My Head Was a Sledgehammer, which runs through March 27 at Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York. The experience, Nash writes, “was frustrating, exhilarating and titillating, sensually, spiritually, intellectually.” In this account of…

Oscar Wilde’s famous pronouncement that life imitates art far more than art imitates life was never better exemplified than last month when details of the Nancy Kerrigan assault case began to be known. Initial reports of the attack by a masked man with a club impressed listeners as merely another instance of the endemic violence…