By Bill Marx
The month contains plenty of summerish entertainment, from a new baseball musical to a campy Alfred Hitchcock parody and a jazzy update of The Mikado. For me, the standouts are the more demanding fare, such as a festival of new American theater pieces and an exciting opportunity see Shakespeare’s rarely staged Timon of [...]

More than any other art, theater asks for relevance. A play that convinces us that “this is the way it is now” can be excused many shortcomings. At any one moment there is a particular quality of feeling which dominates in human intercourse, a tonality which marks the present from the past, and when this [...]

By Bill Marx
October includes the usual line-up of plays by seal-of-approval dramatists, Edward Albee and Conor McPherson, but there’s some welcome new blood, from Punchdrunk’s athletic adaptation of “Macbeth” to “Little Black Dress,” playwright Ronan Noone’s latest salvo at our national psyche, and “The Overwhelming,” the Boston premiere of a critically acclaimed study of Americans [...]

Observe the ass … his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals. — Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson”
The Donkey Show Conceived by Randy Weiner. Directed by Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner. Presented by the American Repertory Theater at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA Presented by American Repertory Theater, at [...]

Let us hob-and-nob with Death — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Duck Variations by David Mamet. Directed by Marcus Stern. Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet. Directed by Paul Stacey. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA, through June 28.
Reviewed by Bill Marx
Death be not mentioned in David Mamet’s early [...]

By Bill Marx
Earlier this month, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, stoked up the cultural consternation machine when he implied that American writers are too provincial to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. American literary life is “too isolated, too insular” he opines, its writers don’t translate particularly well and they aren’t players [...]

In a recent article in the Boston Business Journal, the city’s theaters talk about how they are dealing with the serious economic challenges besetting stages around the country. The litany of woes is familiar: audiences are graying, competition is growing, high ticket prices are prohibitive, and subscription numbers are slipping. Does it surprise anyone that [...]

Thomas Garvey asks me some compelling questions in his post, and I want to address them because they touch on some of the reasons I have started writing this blog.
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