Essays about Culture Page 225

As a 12-year-old schoolboy, Paul Slabolepszy, one of South Africa’s most outspoken anti-apartheid playwrights, had his first encounter with political protest. Raised in a conservative, rural town and educated at a segregated Catholic boarding school, Slabolepszy remembers traveling to Johannesburg for a sporting event with the swim team. On the way, the bus full of…

The 1960s are not dead, at least not for some holdouts in Maubeuge, a small town two hours out of Paris. There on a cold weekend last April, numerous international theatre folk celebrated the momentous decade by eating a sumptuous five-hour meal while reminiscing about the past. The feast was sponsored by the Maubeuge International…

The partnership between an artistic director and managing director becomes dysfunctional if one person is supposed to light the spark and the other to contain it,” observed Jack O’Brien, artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. Addressing the 65 participants from theatres across the country who gathered in San Diego June 19-20 for Theatre…

In what has become practically an annual ritual, the House of Representatives passed the 1994 Interior Appropriations Bill in mid-July after staving off an amendment that would have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts entirely–but not before adopting a measure to reduce the agency’s budget by five percent. The initial recommendation by the Clinton…

The National Endowment for the arts announced in July a total of $7.2 million in grants to 231 professional theatre companies for the 1993-94 performance season. The grants, awarded under the Theater Program’s Professional Theater Companies category, represent a decrease from the previous year, when 236 grants totaling $7.5 million were awarded. The grants, ranging…

Playwright Kathleen McGhee-Anderson actively defies categorization. She has written successfully for theatre, film and television, crossed with ease the line between drama and comedy, and created an unusual literary voice which combines pure theatricality with poetic flourish and cinematic technique. Mothers her latest stage effort, presented last spring at New Jersey’s Crossroads Theatre Company under…

The theatre writers in Tokyo’s English newspapers started to call Issey Ogata a Japanese Woody Allen nine months ago, when he began the build-up to his American debut in New York. Ever since his first special show for an English-speaking audience last winter in Kyoto brought down the house, the comparison-makers have been busy trying…

Sun streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Santa Monica Police Activities League, brightening the face of 14-year-old Stevie as he offers an imaginary gift to his friend Mike, who is turning 10 today. “I give you a pill to turn anything into anything,” says Stevie, and Mike grins as he places the pill into…

Every generation, Jan Kott argues in his seminal work Shakespeare Our Contemporary, should have its own Hamlet. For Kott and his generation, that Hamlet was a figure of the mid-century, a Hamlet in conflict with Stalinism. In fact, different environments and different cultures existing in the same historical period on two opposite sides of the…

The ideas of Antonin Artaud have infected and transformed the modern theatre. His tract The Theatre and Its Double stands alongside the writings of Stanislavsky and Brecht as a canonical work of 20th-century theatrical theory. But during his brief and unhappy life, Artaud was denounced by his Surrealist cohorts, roundly dismissed as a lunatic, and…