Essays about Culture Page 239

Nov. 22, 1963, lives in infamy as the day John F. Kennedy was shot. But it was also the day that one of America’s best-loved performers nearly poisoned himself to death with his own costumes. Liberace had been feeling ill all day. He was scheduled to play a concert that night in Hershey, Penn., and…

The show ended at San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros one February night like any other. The audience applauded and went home; the cast washed up and headed out. One actor, pleased enough with his performance in a variety of roles in Joe Pintauro’s Wild Blue – among them, a gay uncle making amends with an estranged…

Like the shy, obsessive heroines of her earliest plays, Adrienne Kennedy led something of a sheltered childhood. She grew up in the 1930s and ’40s in the integrated and culturally diverse middle-class neighborhoods of Mt. Pleasant and Glenville on the east side of Cleveland. “It was an exciting neighborhood, an exciting mixture of people, immigrant…

The playbill for a show presented at Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts reads: “Two One-Act Plays performed as part of the Performance Induced Personality Transformation & Immunity Project.” Further along, the program contains this eye-opener: “Because we need to draw blood and have it shipped by 5 p.m. each day, we…

Paula Vogel always encourages the students in her MFA playwriting workshop at Brown University to write plays that can be staged for under $100. The exercise is less concerned with teaching her novice playwrights how to negotiate the deplorable state of funding for the arts than it is to get them to rethink the theatrical…

In August 1991, Brass Tacks Theatre of Minneapolis announced it was closing, effective immediately. The theatre had no debt, the board and artists were united, the past season successful and fund-raising for the upcoming season secure. The theatre thanked all of its funders prior to the public announcement and served notice it would not be…

TWENTY-ONE PRODUCTIONS are scheduled to open on Broadway this spring, nearly as many as opened in the first six months of the season. And an unusually high number of Hollywood celebrities will ride into town with the productions, raising expectations among some that Broadway may once again become a vibrant part of New York’s cultural…

Women on men (and vicversa) Toward the end of Arnold Wesker’s new play Three Women Talking, a slightly tipsy character named Claire Dawn Hope delivers a long speech at an all-female dinner party. Introduced mock-portentously as “the Puzaltski story,” the speech is a vulgar joke about a wife who fills in for her football-player husband…

Faced so consistently with actors maneuvered by auteur-directors who disdain them almost as much as they loathe the transparency of good playwriting, I”m prepared, at last, to confess that Donald Wolfit was one of the greatest actors I ever saw. By which I mean to indicate, quixotically perhaps, that great actors in the full sway…

Exit, pursued by a bear” is a bit of a stretch for most theatres producing The Winter’s Tale. But on radio, this stage direction stretches imagination rather than resources: A bear’s roar, a man’s terrified scream and off? Maybe a narrator stating it simply and chillingly? Or with a smile in his voice, as with…