Essays on Politics Page 350

At a recent meeting of representatives from different arts fields, one of the participants offered a suggestion: In this increasingly conservative climate, with the religious right and conservative politicians nibbling away at the National Endowment for the Arts, perhaps it is time to look for alternative funding sources for those “controversial” art forms that are…

A chorus of nine naked males clog dance to bouncy rhythms of “THE Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” A boy with green hair is immersed upside down in a fish tank and whipped, his nude body sparking with rings through his tongue, nipples, stomach and genitals. Somebody’s Fairy Godmother is carried onstage: a four-foot-high…

Never before have we had to rely so much on nonprofit organizations to maintain elementary decency in our society as we do today, but at the same time never before have the challenges for nonprofits been tougher. Some of the difficulties arise from the nature of American culture. At our best, Americans have the enthusiasm,…

Chicago-based playwright and actor Scott McPherson has been named a recipient of a 1991 Whiting Writers’ Award for his second play, Marvin’s Room, a black comedy originally produced at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and currently running at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. The Whiting Foundation, now in its seventh year, annually awards $30,000 grants to each of…

As I recently screened a video for my students of Robert Wilson’s celebrated Hamburg production of The Black Rider — I had seen a performance two summers ago at the Vienna Festival, where Wilson adapted it for Austrian television — I was reminded of what a loss it was for American audiences when the appearance…

Weimar recreated at Louisville Classics Festival, highlighted by rare visit of the Berliner Ensemble. In the 1920s, Berlin was a city with a case of the jitters. From the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918 to the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933, Berlin and Germany experienced, in the…

New information programs, new appointments and a slate of new grants to assist the nation’s artistically underserved communities have been announced by the National Endowment for the Arts.The United States Travel and Tourism Administration has teamed up with the NEA to develop a plan to help instill an increased awareness of America’s cultural diversity to…

Veteran lighting designer Jenifer Tipton made her debut as a director in October at Minneapoli’s Guthrie Theater with a harsh, uncompromising production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Her sudden transformation from design artist to director was a bold step that surprised many perhaps no one more than Tipton herself. The project had its beginnings in the spring…

Subterranean rhythms Orpheus, the dauntless son of Thracian King Oeagrus and the muse Calliope, is one of history’s most renowed poet-musicians – real or invented. The god Apollo presented him with a lyre whose ethereal sounds had power to soothe savage beasts and cause rocks and trees to move. When his beloved wife Eurydice abruptly died…

Joseph Papp was the most powerful and infuential man in the American theatre, dominating his world through the force of his own dazzling paradoxical personality. For him, there was no contradiction in the diverse roles he chose to play. An idealist had to be a pragmatist, for how else would he able to bring his ideals…