Theater

The Winter’s Tale (Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) Tell all the truth but tell it slant —Success in Circuit liesToo bright for our infirm DelightThe Truth’s superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children easedWith explanation kindThe Truth must dazzle graduallyOr every man be blind — This famous 8 line poem by Emily Dickinson is the […]

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless […]

The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. J Marshall – Tribaleye Images / Alamy I am admittedly enamored with the idea that things possess dimensions that can’t be seen. Artists are particularly drawn to this idea, but I was […]

At a time when things feel particularly frayed and fragile, finding a place of clarity and comfort is hard. Frequent reference has been made to the haunting the lines of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Every […]

Paula Vogel wrote the play, How I Learned to Drive, by staying up all night for two weeks. She had secured a theater residency in Juneau, but unforeseen circumstances caused her to arrive empty handed. As a result, she was highly aware of an obligation to produce something quickly. The long days of sunlight, the […]

Kurt Vonnegut was famous for his conviction that all stories conform to very defined narrative shapes. He liked to chart out each storyline’s trajectory—he had about eight of them–and gave them names like “Man in Hole” and “Boy Meets Girl.” And now AI has demonstrated that these fundamental story forms are indeed legit–identifiable, indelible, ubiquitous. […]

“A cartographic conception is very distinct from the archaeological conception… The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory: it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception…Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the […]

Shakespeare on the Boston Common (Photo: Courtesy of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) This summer has the look of life back in 2019. Lots of concerts, outdoor gatherings, busy beaches, people on vacations, overbooked flights. Even so, dogged remnants of where we have been remain, like masked faces that can still be spotted in the crowds. (I […]

The Lehman Trilogy, at the Huntington Theater (Photo courtesy of the Huntington Theater) . It is a gesture of dramatic bravado to stage the 150-year rise and fall of a multi-generational immigrant family in America, and do it all with just three actors and a minimal set. But some stories have an appeal so trenchant […]