When you enter New York Theatre Workshop’s space on E. 4th St. to see Once, the musical adaptation of the 2007 Irish indie film (see my 2007 blog post on the film), the well-worn theatre suddenly feels like a party hall. The stage has been transformed into a bar, replete with distressed old mirrors and sconce lights, and [...]
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Queen of the Mist is a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa (Marie Christine, The Wild Party), which the Transport Group produced at the Judson Gym in the West Village last month. Starring the fiercely charismatic Mary Testa, the musical tells the story of Anna “Annie” Edson Taylor (1838 – 1921), the first person to [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on DECEMBER 7, 2011 · 2 COMMENTS
After I posted on Hung, I watched a few more episodes, catching up with a recent story-line (Episode 27, “What’s Going on Downstairs or Don’t Eat Prince Eric“) about Ray’s encounters with Kyla (Jamie Clayton), the transgender client Lenore introduces to his services without telling Ray that Kyla, who presents as a woman, is “actually” [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on NOVEMBER 30, 2011 · 3 COMMENTS
Composer Stephen Schwartz and director John-Michael Tebelak conceived and wrote Godspell as Carnegie-Mellon University students in the early 1970s (almost all the lyrics are taken verbatim from the Gospels).
When it opened Off Broadway at LaMama in 1971, the Viet Nam War still raged; Charles Manson and his followers were being sentenced for the murder of Sharon [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on NOVEMBER 27, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
Showtime’s Homeland debuted on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. The series stars Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, a CIA operative who’s learned that an American soldier in the Middle East has been “turned” and now works for an Al Qaeda cell. When Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is found [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on NOVEMBER 25, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
With Nurse Jackie and The Big C on hiatus for now, I’ve returned to Hung on HBO, which is enjoying its third season of social observation through the foibles of a male prostitute and his female pimp. I’ve also been watching Homeland on Showtime, to see how it unravels its post-9/11 tale of paranoid intrigue. My viewing is selective, but it [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on NOVEMBER 8, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
David Henry Hwang has long chronicled the complications of Asian and western cultures clashing with mostly deleterious effects. His play M. Butterfly, which premiered on Broadway in 1988, famously narrated the story of a western diplomat who lived in China and fell in love with a communist spy he thought was a woman. With [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on NOVEMBER 3, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
It’s been 30+ years since I’ve seen the Bergman movie on which Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep Amsterdam production is based, but in any case, this production’s searing theatricality provides the same story in a medium so utterly different, reference to the original seems unnecessary. Charles Isherwood, in his New York Times’ review, called [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on OCTOBER 31, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Seeing these two plays back to back made me think a lot about content and style in realist dramas. Both Itamar Moses’s Completeness and Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad concern relationships, in more or less domestic settings. Completeness is about young people, just starting out in their lives;Sweet and Sad is about a middle-aged family whose lives have been rocked in [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on OCTOBER 19, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
After all the press brouhaha about Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark for these many years, and the vituperative reviews from most of the mainstream critics, I was surprised to find the show so benign when I finally saw it. Thanks to Jenny Slattery, who’s a stalwart assistant stage manager onSpiderman, I wrangled house seats and a [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on OCTOBER 17, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
Writer/director Maryam Keshavarz’s beautiful, disturbing film tells the story of two Iranian high school girlfriends in Teheran whose growing attraction and love for one another quickly hits the wall of religious interdiction and oppressive patriarchy. Filmed with a grainy realism, Circumstance is haunted by impending doom, even in its frequent moments of whimsical [...]
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THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on SEPTEMBER 23, 2011 ·
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[Note to readers: My mother, Cyma Dolan, died on August 19th, which I share only to explain the radio silence on The Feminist Spectator. I’ve been surprised how grief has seemed to steal my words, making it hard to write here and elsewhere. My mom loved awards shows; writing about the Emmys seems a good way to find [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on AUGUST 20, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
In May, I participated in the Feminist Performance Festival in Chicago, organized by E. Patrick Johnson and their Northwestern colleagues in performance studies and women’s studies. (Seemy blog post with a description and my remarks.) I’m posting here the transcript of the conversation I moderated with performers Holly Hughes, Rhodessa Jones, and Lenelle Moise on May [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on AUGUST 18, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
I had the pleasure of also receiving last week a lifetime achievement award from the Women and Theatre Program (WTP) of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). My membership in the WTP goes back to the early 1980s; I served as President in the late 80s/early 90s, following my friend and colleague Vicki [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on AUGUST 16, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
I was honored to receive the 2011 Outstanding Teacher in Higher Education award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) last week at the conference in Chicago. How moved I was to see so many former students and colleagues in the audience, and to be on the podium with so many other wonderful [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 18, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Called to my attention by its writer/producer, Anna Fishbeyn, Sex in Mommyville has been transformed from a solo show that opened in 2010 at the Flea Theatre in NYC to a multi-character play that’s premiering at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre on July 27, 29, and 31.
The show has also been booked to play at the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 17, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
I really enjoyed the final installment in the Harry Potter film series. I read the book when it was first released, and remember feeling very moved by how J.K. Rowling wrapped up her epic saga. Although the plot details of how Harry and company retrieve the Horcruxes necessary to destroy Voldemort sometimes escaped me—in the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 16, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
The Galway Arts Festival opened last Monday, July 11, promising an impressive range of Irish and global theatre and performance opportunities through July 24. My own consumption of the daily events and productions began with a site-specific production of Franz Xavier Kroetz’s Request Programme. First produced in Stuttgart in 1973, the play [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 6, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Úna McKevitt conceived and directed the companion pieces Victor & Gord and 565+, which were performed together at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Ireland, last weekend. Seeing the performances under the auspices of the Synge Summer School in County Wicklow, which is directed by the Irish theatre and performance scholar Patrick Lonergan, the evening raised a host of [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 28, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
In the category of shameless self-promotion, let me call your attention to two forthcoming titles, one by my partner, Stacy Wolf (or “Feminist Spectator 2″) and the other a collection of performances by Peggy Shaw, which I edited for the University of Michigan Press.
Stacy’s book, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 26, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
I’ve been living and teaching in Galway, Ireland, since the beginning of June, working with my co-teacher Stacy Wolf, 15 Princeton students, and five local students in a Princeton Global Seminar called “Performing Irishness: Performance and Theater in Modern and Contemporary Ireland.”Galway is a lovely, small university town on the west coast of the country, [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 12, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
I recently had the good fortune to have an op-ed piece on the dearth of women playwrights nominated for Tonys this year picked up by the Huffington Post. (Thanks to all of you who saw the piece and sent me notes.)
Turns out, I’m not the only critic thinking along these lines as the awards [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 28, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
I saw The Shaggs Philosophy of the World at Playwrights Horizons on Wednesday (May 25, 2011), in its second preview performance. Based on a true story, The Shaggs describes how Dot, Betty, and Helen Wiggins, sisters from Fremont, NH, were coerced into becoming a band by their mercurial, rather psychotic father, Austin, whose plan for his daughters’ [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 27, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
For the last nearly six years (since August 2005), I’ve mostly used the occasion of this blog to indulge in long-form essays about theatre, film, performance, television, and anything else that catches my fancy. But lately, I’ve become aware that because I take some time to draft and craft these posts, I wind up commenting [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 21, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
On Friday, May 20, 2011, I moderated a panel discussion on feminist performance at Northwestern University’s “Feminist Performance Festival,” organized by E. Patrick Johnson, Ramon Rivera-Servera, and Ann Orloff for the Departments of Performance Studies and Gender Studies. E. Patrick asked me to discuss the history of feminist performance, and to offer contextualizing remarks prior to [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 17, 2011 · 4 COMMENTS
Seeing the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s landmark AIDS play, The Normal Heart, prompted me to think again about activist theatre and how it might effectively communicate its consciousness-changing intent in popular mainstream forums. First performed at the Public Theatre in 1985, when the AIDS crisis was just beginning, the play’s furious indictment of government and [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 15, 2011 · 8 COMMENTS
The Tony Awards season confirms what anyone concerned about the status of women in the arts has long come to expect: plays by women are excluded from the nominations once again. When will entertainment power brokers realize that until work by women is produced and recognized, Americans will continue to hear only one side of the stories [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 25, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People offers a compelling, if liberal, view of race, class, and gender relations in contemporary Boston. The Broadway production, directed with subtle clarity by Daniel Sullivan, boasts a top-notch cast, who bring to their roles a kind of fruitful empathy that still doesn’t shy away from delving into the complications of people [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 9, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
This very smart play presents a conundrum of ideas and feelings which, happily, it refuses to sort out in any complete or resolved way. Part of playwright Madeleine George’s point is to suggest that even when we think we’ve got it all figured out, life becomes more ambiguous and ambivalent for reasons far out of our [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 29, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Bathsheba Doran’s lovely new play is a meditation on community and the unlikely ways in which it forms and dissolves across time. With a light touch and moving, smart insights, Doran paints a series of vignettes that illustrate how despite the fundamental ambivalence with which we make our collective way through our lives, our sometimes unlikely [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 19, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play, Fen, represents the British feminist playwright at her best, even though the play is rarely produced. In this revival at London’s Finborough Theatre, director Ria Parry (Iron Shoes Productions) and a top-notch cast offer a thrilling reminder of Churchill’s theatricality and her incisive Marxist/feminist analysis of the politics of gender, sexuality, and [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 17, 2011 · 2 COMMENTS
When I heard that Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss would star in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s classic realist play The Children’s Hour in London this spring, my first thought was, “Why now?” The play, written in 1934, remains one of Hellman’s most famous. Based on a true story about two headmistresses in Scotland in 1810, [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 28, 2011 · 2 COMMENTS
Every year, I settle in to watch the Academy Awards show, and every year, I come away disappointed. Last night’s show promised something a little different—young co-hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco were supposed to bring verve and energy to a show that continually runs out of steam well before the finish line. If it’s not [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 18, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Austin Pendleton directs Paul Schmidt’s translation of Chekhov’s play with verve and surprising wit, giving the play a hint of contemporary relevance while maintaining a light touch over the production’s pace and tone. Schmidt’s translation is breezy and colloquial, sometimes awkwardly balancing the lyricism of Chekhov’s poetry with a vernacular style that sounds a lot [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 13, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
I missed the Public’s production of Merchant in the Park last summer, and so was happy for an unexpected chance to see it last weekend on Broadway. I’d heard various responses to Al Pacino as Shylock, and to how director Daniel Sullivan handled the play’s notorious anti-Semitism. But I was surprised by how powerful and moving I found [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 7, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
This production, by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, of one of Ibsen’s last plays, is beautiful from top to bottom, but the set and the performances far outweigh the text itself. The play is a pot-boiler that touches on most of Ibsen’s major themes without offering any new insights into his well-established views on bourgeois corruption and [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 21, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Sarah Treem’s terrific new play, in a beautiful production directed by Emily Mann at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, is that it’s a two-hander for women in which no one kills themselves. Performed with commitment, humor, and nuance by Mercedes Ruehl and Bess Rous, The How and the Why is [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 18, 2011 · 2 COMMENTS
This elegiac evening with Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and musician Vivian Stoll is a beautiful meditation on change, loss, and aging, delivered as a Sid Caesar/Imogene Coco- or Mike Nichols/Elaine May- style lounge act with post-modern stylings. In Dixon Place’s expansive basement black-box theatre—excavated, as Shaw and Weaver imagine, from three stories of layered dirt—the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 13, 2011 · 2 COMMENTS
Jomama Jones: Radiate, an incomparable performance art/concert created by singer-lyricist-performer-playwright Daniel Alexander Jones, is the first downtown theatre must-see experience of 2011. Jones (Jomama and her alter-ego, Daniel Alexander) is a brilliant persona, full of love, light, and beautiful lyrics and stories. The abundance of charisma and good will emanating from the small stage at [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 10, 2011 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Although it takes a moment or two to pick up speed, Adam Bock’s play at Playwrights Horizons gathers momentum as it hurtles toward a conclusion that might have left me bereft but instead is surprisingly hopeful and heartening. A Small Fire is ultimately about what we can survive without, and how elemental love might become when [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 8, 2011 · 1 COMMENT
The second half of the Angels revival at the Signature Theatre at proved as satisfying as the first, if not more so, since the story deepens and expands as the play breathes into its ideas and its characters. I love the progress toward a renewed community in Part Two of the play, in which Kushner lets Louis reconnect [...]
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