Essays about Culture Page 223

Explaining that she wishes to give something back in return for the rich life she has experienced in the arts, actress Jane Alexander made her congressional debut before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee on Sept. 22 and was swiftly and unanimously confirmed as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Although unanimity…

Players Theatre Columbus has ceased all operations,” says the woman’s voice on the answering machine, sounding the death knell of the professional Ohio company, first founded as a community theatre in 1923. Fifty full- and part-time staff members and 4,200 subscribers were left out in the cold when the theatre’s board of trustees, citing a…

There are many goals the author attempts to achieve but the most probable one is to alert the reader, as Amrita Pritam believes, of the backwardness of the rural society in India from a feminist perspective. She does this using a special approach in which she does not adopt the critical method nor does she…

When the repertoire of the Czechoslovakian National Theatre was controlled by the ruling Communist government, Bockerer was an approved play. The party permitted this obscure 1948 piece by Ulrich Becher and Peter Preses because of its anti-Nazi and pro-worker stance, and because the one communist activist in the World War II comedy-drama was presented with…

Further expanding its extensive collection of Athol Fugard’s works, Theatre Communications Group has just published a new volume composed of Fugard’s latest South African drama, Playland, and an earlier, highly personal work, A Place with the Pigs.Playland charts the unlikely relationship between a white South African army veteran and a black amusement-park night watchman. The…

Built on scenic, typhoon-lashed hills at the tip of a peninsula jutting into the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok was never a typical Soviet city. Home port of the Red Navy’s Pacific Fleet, it was closed even to Soviets from other regions until its official opening Jan. 1, 1992; yet because of the thousands of wandering…

In the beginning, we’re told, was the Word. In American regional theatre, the word was that of Sophocles and Schiller, Shaw and Shepard, above all Shakespeare. And, at the beginning, it was scripture. When the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the model and seminal force behind what would become the American regional theatre movement, launched its…

Despite its firebreathing, apocalyptic title, The End of Acting: A Radical View is eminently orthodox. Author Richard Hornby is no crackpot extremist peddling a newfangled method, but a traditional Stanislavskian calling for a careful re-reading of the Master, to be achieved by disentangling him from his chief American (mis)interpreter, Lee Strasberg. Though Hornby pays only…

Dex Edwards’s designs are often hailed for their “magic.” This, it turns out, is not completely coincidental. “I started working professionally as an actor when I was in the third grade,” he confesses, “and that was because what I really wanted to do was be a magician.” Edwards’s career has been a continuum of becoming…

Two recent monographs in “important authors” series from Twayne and Continuum are scholastically useful surveys of Sam Shepard’s career – the sort of books you like to have handy on the shelf for brushing up on half-forgotten plots, tracking down errant quotations or noshing on a biographical snack. These books are headed for college libraries,…