Tag
Drama
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Diaspora, Indebted: On “Industry”
“Gambling with big bets against challenging odds, regarded warily by moneylenders, questioned about your ability to balance your books, needing to take on more debt to pay back older debt. Whom exactly are we talking about here: Rishi or Britain?”
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Price-Tag TV and the Transformation of Television Prestige
Apple’s “Price-Tag TV,” to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can’t see or don’t care about the difference between good and expensive.
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Chekhov’s Pandemic?
Even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to “Tom Lake” and “Our Country Friends,” these novels are irradiated by the theater.
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B-Sides: Menander’s “Dyskolos”
The arc of any romantic comedy remains incomplete until the misanthrope is brought into the fold of society.
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Payback: Korean Revenge Dramas Will Do It for You
South Korean media excels at the revenge plot. Here are seven shows you can stream right now to get your fix.
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Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Theater
Even in Shakespeare’s era, theaters literally shielded people from the state. Today’s theaters might talk sanctuary, but rarely practice it.
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Nuclear Noir
At its core, noir is a feeling: realizing one’s own helplessness, when faced with the vast networks of power that control everyday life.
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Alison Carey and Amrita Ramanan on Theater and Climate Change
“Greenturgy” orients a theatrical production toward the play’s environment. And every play has one.
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Helen of West Hollywood
It hardly seems necessary to offer a spoiler alert for news that is well over two millennia old. But some news is so surprising, so contrary to everything we thought we knew, that time can do little …
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“Euphoric” Heroes
“I know your generation relied on flowers and fathers’ permission,” says Rue, the protagonist of HBO’s Euphoria, “but it’s 2019, and unless you’re Amish, nudes are the currency of love, so stop shaming …
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Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a …
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We Like Short Shorts
We seem to be in an age in which short forms have risen from minor to major cultural commodities. On November 30, 2017, word went out on the internet that Vine, a defunct video-sharing platform, might come back from the dead. The news made a lot of people very excited. Ever since Vine discontinued uploads…
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11 TV Shows Professors Are Watching This Summer
The academic year has wound to a definitive close, the Handmaid’s Tale hype has died down, and those of the professorial persuasion now have less than two blissful months remaining …
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A Tale of Two Artists in ”La La Land”
It isn’t a surprise that Damien Chazelle’s third film, the sunny musical La La Land, would be a portrait of jazz artistry. His 2009 debut …
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The Model-Minority Bubble
Perhaps the most famous shopping trip in American literature can be found in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Wounded by a colleague’s unflattering assessment of his appearance, Jack Gladney turns to impulse buying as a form of self-help. “The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums,”…
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“Harry Potter” and “Hamilton” from the Stage to the Page
Move over, Shakespeare. The best-selling play on record is the script of the London theater smash Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was published as the latest installment of J. K. Rowling’s wizard saga this summer. In its first week, the script whizzed past the cumulative sales for the previously top-ranked Romeo and Juliet, making…
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The Taming of the Bard
We still take our Shakespearean directives from London, and this year’s news has been welcome: it was the summer of women and Shakespeare. The long reigns of Artistic Directors Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole at Shakespeare’s Globe have ended, and with them went the pursuit of “original practices” that left female performers out of the…
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The Bingewatch: It’s Never Just a Dress
My ongoing love affair with TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress began about two months ago, when a close friend prescribed the long-running reality show as a remedy for my encroaching PhD graduation anxiety. It was May, and thus also the cusp of wedding season, making SYTTD a particularly timely recommendation. I’d been beset by…
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Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also directs—on the horizon, Shapiro has made a reluctant entry into the limelight on awards show red carpets, Paley Center panels, and other events for the…
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Shakespeare in 2016
Over the last four centuries, we’ve reinvented Shakespeare to suit our purposes, much as Shakespeare borrowed from his past to do the same.1 2016 commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It’s also a year forged in the aftermath of ISIS attacks in Brussels and Paris, Richard Dear’s attack on a Planned Parenthood center…
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#Normporn
In the penultimate season of 30 Rock (2006–13), the sitcom’s resident kinkmeisters and genderqueer lovers, Jenna and Paul, are faced with a profound sexual crisis: after chatting about their day …
