Essays about Culture Page 221

Simply put, it’s an American Dream story: The Santos brothers, sons of Mexican immigrants, grow up to become attorneys, establish a successful law firm and wield power in their hometown of El Paso, Tex. They also run a drug ring, indulge a penchant for high-stakes gambling and commit murder in the most horrific ways imaginable…

During the recent glorious days of Indian Summer, President and Mrs. Clinton hosted two days of celebration honoring 18 recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities. The ceremony on the White House lawn, the evening reception which followed, and the lunch the next day at which Jane…

“My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow’so…

It’s Wednesday night at Chicago’s most venerable coffeehouse, the No Exit. An improv group called Bang Bang has been playing here late on Wednesdays. They’re supposed to be hot. They’re supposed to be good. They’re supposed to have an interesting approach. The Chicago Tribune ran a friendly piece about them in the Sunday arts section….

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON: “An open drain,” “unutterably offensive,” “repulsive and degrading,” “garbage and offal” these were typical of the critics’ comments on Ibsen’s Ghosts when it opened in London in 1891. William Archer, one of the playwright’s most fervent admirers (and his translator) collated the horrendous reviews and called them a “shriek of execration.” In these more…

If the play’s the thing, what’s the play script good for? Aside from replenishing the arid reservoir of audition monologues and testifying to a play’s critical or box-office success, if we’re lucky, the printed text is as good as literature. It can be ruminated on like a volume of poetry. And when gathered and bound…

“If you haven’t been back to Broadway for a while, this is the show to see!” Sound like the words of a critic who’s dying to see his or her name in the print ads? Not quite–it’s the sign-off of a TV special put together by WNYW, the Fox affiliate in New York. The line…

Owen Dodson never got his big break. An exceptionally talented writer and director, Dodson hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of the black intelligentsia from W.E.B. du Bois to James Baldwin and inspired younger generations of black poets and artists. Yet Dodson, a professor of drama at Howard University for 25 years, never became a…

I am going to study the setting and atmosphere of three short stories written in the Victorian era, I will attempt to understand how the Victorian society was based on these texts. Sikes and Nancy written by CHARLES DICKENS in 1869, The Black Cottage written by WILKIE COLLINS in 1859 and The Treasure In The…

Innocence” isn’t something you’d expect to be thinking about if you were to find yourself sitting amidst the opulent fin-desiecle passementerie that fills the sitting room of New York’s best-loved theatrical drag performer, chatting about his recent experience playing the female lead in The Maids, Jean Genet’s transvestite drama of madness, envy and murder. Yet…