Essays about Culture Page 220

Performance studies is the ideal field of study for the intellectually promiscuous. In what other academic program can you research the death rituals of the Yanomamo tribe, compare them to the construction of the self in a Jane Fonda exercise video, and then present your findings in the form of a modern dance piece? This…

A classic, to hear Mark Twain tell it, is something everyone praises, but nobody reads. In a theatrical context, maybe that would become–nobody produces. At Actors Theatre of Louisville each year, scholars (some travel-weary, some eager, some with the ivory tower equivalent of cabin fever) are joined by critics, plain-clothed practitioners and the idle curious…

No Shakespeare play has been subjected to so furious, sharply divided and sustained debate over its basic merit as Timon of Athens. The play is seldom produced, in part because it seems unfinished. It lacks Shakespeare’s usual consistency of poetic genius, the second half is haphazardly structured and some speakers are even left without names….

In some sports and intellectual pursuits, results are evaluated both by the success of the final product and the “degree of difficulty” of the attempt. By this system, the figure skater, gymnast or test-taker gets a better grade for doing a harder thing even if the performance is not flawless than for a perfect execution…

The 40-odd students in the professional theatre training program at the University of Delaware are sprawled across the floor of what was once a women’s gym, waiting to begin the daily ritual of their group warmup. It’s 9:00 a.m. on a chilly November morning, and among the students who are stretching and chatting are many…

George Bernard Shaw once wrote of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, “The reformer we need most today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.” Today, Shaw’s hero could easily be Elizabeth Smith. For more than 30 years, Smith, a vocal consultant and dialect…

When you rip your heart out of your chest in the Fichandler Theatre at Arena Stage, you don’t just yank it out and drop it on the bed–especially if you are the ghost of Jacob Marley and you’ve been dead for seven years, and it’s Christmas Eve. And even though the stage directions only say,…

Bill Womack is used to being a “first.” As a person of color in the largely white profession of child psychiatry, he’s accustomed to breaking new ground. Still, he wasn’t quite prepared for the overwhelming isolation he felt when he joined the board of directors at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre in 1987. “I had no…

The Tale of the Green Bird is the most daring play that ever issued from my inkwell,” declared Carlo Gozzi, the 18th-century Italian fabulist. “Daring” is a relative term, of course. But when the dizzyingly original Gozzi claims something as his most daring work, that really says something. And yet chances are that audiences don’t…

Between the world wars, style was in ascendance and musical comedy was so central to popular culture that a composer’s name could sum up an attitude toward life. This was particularly true of Noel Coward and Cole Porter, and not just because they wrote words as well as music. They were the supreme practitioners of…