Artists should “no longer huddle in the confines of a painted box set” but instead join together to “find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time” and dramatize “the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world.” – Hallie Flanagan, Federal Theatre Project
Stick Fly [...]

American author Robert Stone is attuned to the havoc latent in masculine pride and to the hostility likely to break out for no particular reason between males of our species.
Fun With Problems: Stories by Robert Stone, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Though one of our prose masters, Robert Stone is less acknowledged [...]

Reviewed By Caldwell Titcomb
It has been many years since a major new opera was mounted here. But Opera Boston has done just that with its recent world premiere of “Madame White Snake” at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. This was the most demanding and expensive undertaking in the company’s history.
Share/Save

By Justin Marble
March 2–4, “Children of Invention” at the Brattle: Young filmmaker Tze Chun’s first feature was shot on location in Boston and focuses on a single mother with two small children struggling to make ends meet. When she doesn’t return home one night from her con-artist-esque job, it falls to the older [...]

By J. R. Carroll
March is the month for Elder Statesmen—and drummers.
Bassist Buster Williams has played and recorded with, well, damn near everyone, and currently leads his own Something More Quartet; they’ll be coming to Scullers on March 2 at 8 p.m.

Photo by Mandy Hall, available under a
Creative Commons Attribution license.
Drummer Cindy Blackman, who’s made several [...]

By Caldwell Titcomb
March 2: The Contemporary Music Ensemble in residence at Boston University, Alea III, under the direction of Theodore Antoniou, offers a free concert in celebration of the late eminent composer/teacher/conductor Lukas Foss (1922–2009). Works by Foss to be performed are “Echoi,” “For Toru,” “Elegy for Anne Frank,” “For Aaron,” “The Prairie,” and “Behold! [...]

Boredom is the root of all evil . . . The influence that it exerts is altogether magical, except that it is not the influence of attraction, but of repulsion. — Søren Kierkegaard, “Either/Or”
Private Fears in Public Places by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by David J. Miller. Set design by Miller. Staged by the [...]

It’s not every day you meet a new food, one you’ve never seen or tasted, one you can’t identify. You can never know everything about food. It’s humbling, just when you thought you were getting a handle on things. There’s always a new ingredient from somewhere on the planet. One year Szechuan pepper, another year [...]

Sometimes what is initially thought to be awkward will eventually be visually pleasing.
—Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 1967
Bars of Color within Squares, a permanent installation in MIT’s Green Center, Cambridge, MA.
Finding Bars of Color within Squares. Photo: George Bouret
Reviewed by Yumi Araki
Hidden between three buildings surrounding Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Green Center, Sol [...]

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
that lift and drop a question on your plate
— From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot, 1917
Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Set designed by Eric Levenson. Staged by the Nora Theatre [...]