Underlying all the lame excuses for excluding plays from our post-modern lives is the intense love-hate relationship between most all religions and live theatre dating from the dawn of Western Civilization. Continue reading Thespis and Theocracy
WORK IN PROGRESS (ALWAYS)
Comments Encouraged
When prehistoric people had no answers for natural forces that controlled their existence, they attributed them to the supernatural—super-human forces, beings—and began to search for ways to influence them, from sacrifice to poetry and music, acting out their hopes and histories, theatrics, evolving into rituals performed by priests. So popular were these rites that they continued to be played even after the mysteries were solved, at which point theater emerged as a separate entity. Continue reading My One True Faith in the Willing Suspension of Disbelief
There are many very good reasons people go to the theatre, and as may very bad ones why they don’t.
The best reason to go is to be drawn into another world from the opening line to the final curtain and walk out gratified, if not transformed, a better person. This sometimes happens when a good play is well-produced.
Good reasons not to go: it costs too much, and too often the plays are trite or trash (or trashy) or (more often still) poorly played, misinterpreted. At best we’re amused. Continue reading To Go or Not to Go
The (Jewish) Defendant in Mamet’s Romance is a chiropodist (no, a chiropractor!) who discovers and proclaims, at the end of Scene Two, in the middle of a vicious (and hilarious) bloodbath of religious bigotry with his (Catholic) Defense Attorney: “I KNOW HOW TO BRING PEACE TO THE MIDDLE EAST!” Continue reading Mamet’s Chiropractor
Cold Reads/International 