Seeing theatre in Central Park is magical under most circumstances. The Delacorte is an intimate space; its horseshoe-shaped house brings the audience in toward the stage, which is small enough that the actors appear close. Behind the set, you can see trees sway in the breeze, and with the best designs, it’s sometimes hard to [...]
by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 16, 2009 · 2 COMMENTS
This new Showtime series stars Edie Falco as a wry, knowing, harried emergency room nurse. The show offers a terrific vehicle for the versatile actor, as a well-written, smart and funny situation-based character study that takes advantage of Falco’s intelligent, restrained emotional presence and her quirky humor. Unlike network doctor dramas like ER, women characters propel Nurse Jackie’s narratives. Jackie [...]
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In playwright Ian Bruce’s note in the program of the New Group’s production ofGroundswell, he addresses the intractable politics of the new South Africa. He describes how blacks are desperately finding their way through administrating a new government, trying to undo decades of damage from apartheid, while whites struggle to find their place in the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 9, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Theresa Rebeck has worked in television on and off, writing for, among other series, NYPDBlue. She’s currently developing an HBO series called Women’s Studies with actor Julie White. To say she’s seen the dark side of the medium would be putting it mildly. Her latest satirical play about the industry is Our House, at Playwright’s Horizons, smartly directed by Michael Mayer and [...]
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Moisés Kaufman first achieved fame as the artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Company, with whom he collaborated on The Laramie Project, their ethnographically- based treatment of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s death at the hands of two local gay-bashing murderers. Tectonic’s first production was Indecent Exposure, which used a similar pastiche process to knit together [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 13, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Yazmina Reza writes crowd-pleasers, plays that appear to give the audience something meaty on which to chew, but essentially put her characters on a predictable collision course, a highway of lite moral complexities in which they find themselves unwittingly and sometimes unwillingly debating ethical issues that finally sound a bit hollow.
But Carnage’s farce [...]
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Schiller’s play Mary Stuart stages a fictitious meeting in the late-1500s between the queen of England and her cousin, the queen of Scotland, a pair of rulers who fought to Mary’s death over religion, power, and the English throne. But this Donmar Warehouse transfer production of a play written in the 1800s that refers to English history of the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 6, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
But of what, might be the question? Mark Harris, one ofEntertainment Weekly’s best columnists (who happens to be Tony Kushner’s husband), remarks this week (5-8-09) that Boyle’s internet success sounds a hopeful note in an otherwise cynical and self- serving celebrity scene. Here’s a woman who attests that her only dream is to sing professionally. As Harris [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 23, 2009 · 2 COMMENTS
I admit that my unshakable fan status prompted me to bite on the Times offer to see Ilene Chaiken and “members of The L Word cast” talk about life after the series (Their lives? Our lives? Life in the world? Didn’t know). I dutifully paid my $30 and traveled into the city April 20th, a miserable rainy [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 16, 2009 · 2 COMMENTS
Late in his distinguished career, Arthur Laurents is making a new name for himself rethinking classic American musicals for which he was an original, key collaborator. After the spectacular success of his recently directed remount of Gypsy, with Patti Lupone, for which he wrote the 1959 book, Laurent has again transformed his writer’s eye [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 11, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Tina Howe’s new play, at Primary Stages (which I saw just before it opened on 4/4/09), continues her career-long exploration of the foibles of blue-blood families and the women they oppress. This version of the story regards a patrician woman toward the end of a distinguished life, who finds herself—thanks to her feckless son—ripped [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 3, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Courtney Hunt’s film Frozen River is a quietly moving examination of lives blinkered by poverty in a small town in upstate New York, close to the Canadian border. As the local economy withers away, residents of the town and those on the nearby Mohawk reservation turn to illegally smuggling immigrants into the country as a way to turn [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 16, 2009 · 2 COMMENTS
Lynn Nottage’s new play, Ruined (Manhattan Theatre Club, 3/8/09), rewrites Mother Courage and Her Children in the context of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She weaves a story that chills spectators with its violence and moves us with the remnants of compassion evident in even the most hard-boiled of the play’s [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 14, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
And so they go, the girls of The L Word, off into the LA lesbian sunset . . . or wait, are they going into the police station to give their testimonies about Jenny’s mysterious death to the hot sheriff who came to investigate her drowning? An overhead shot at the show’s end [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 11, 2009 · 4 COMMENTS
Usually, there’s something pathetic (and as a result irritating) about the women in Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche is flighty and damaged, and Stella is so blindly in love with Stanley, she follows him around like a puppy waiting for him to throw her a bone. Usually, too, even though Blanche, well, blanches when [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 10, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
As religion and fundamentalism come under closer scrutiny, one can only hope, in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s refusal to separate church and state, plays like Savannah Disputation (at Playwrights Horizons, 3/8/09) are a welcome addition to the debate. Evan Smith’s play is ultimately a confection, but its wry barbs and ironic [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 5, 2009 · 2 COMMENTS
Thanks to Marilee Lindemann of Roxie’s World (see “Fellow Travelers” on my sidebar, which is my new version of the blog roll), I’ve managed to add a few gadgets to The Feminist Spectator.
I appreciate all of you who sign up as Followers, and I’m beginning to add more links and cross-referenced material to [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 23, 2009 · 6 COMMENTS
I watch the Oscars avidly, but like most people, have begun to find them boring in recent years. From the opening, insipid red carpet interviews to the long-awaited always too late end, they’ve seemed banal and ridiculous exercises in star-gazing more than celebrations of filmmakers’ accomplishments. Last night’s new and revised show was a vast [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 20, 2009 · 1 COMMENT
The sixth and last season of The L Word constructs the ending of its dyke drama around the mysterious death (murder?) of Jenny Schechter, the character everyone loves to hate. I have to say that I wasn’t an early adopter of the antipathy for Jenny, as were so many fans of the show. When the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 9, 2009 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself), at Primary Stages in New York, breaks the mold of playwright Donald Margulies’s typical style. Among others, his Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner with Friends is a staunchly realist piece about family (or more broadly kinship) relations; A Model Apartment is a slightly [...]
by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 17, 2009 · 1 COMMENT
Written and directed by Phillipe Claudel, I’ve Loved You So Long is a beautiful rendering of a complex relationship between two sisters who barely know each other, yet whose lives are bound together by a tragedy that’s finally understood only at the very end of the movie’s unfolding. Léa (the earnest, open-faced Elsa Zylberstein) arranges [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 14, 2009 · 3 COMMENTS
Seeing this little musical extravaganza (and that’s not, in this case, a contradiction in terms) was like seeing an evening’s worth of product placement, a musical based on a film determined to squeeze every penny from the success of its prior incarnation. That sounds cynical in a way I don’t mean; Billy Elliot works to [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 5, 2009 · 2 COMMENTS
Director Gus Van Sant’s biopic of murdered gay activist Harvey Milk begins where the story ends—with a tearful but stalwart Dianne Feinstein announcing Milk’s death, along with his colleague, San Francisco mayor George Moscone, at the hands of their fellow elected official, City Supervisor Dan White. On this archival footage, people gasping and crying “No!” [...]
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