That I spent the first 13 years of my life living with a Jamaican woman is always striking to those who best know me. Seldom, I suppose, is the topic broached in casual parley. So when I reveal I have … Read More
Though it might otherwise be dismissed as a horribly-written play, Me, Myself & I inspires additional disappointment, flowing as it does from the pen of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee. A moving and clever piece, it is not. Perhaps the only element that could have saved and justified its stodgy formal progression—an insistent meta-theatricality—comes off as forced, hackneyed, dismissible. Yes, Albee reveals, these are actually actors onstage. We get it. Got it. Good.
It’s a show of love, soul, ravished innocence, sexual passion, emotional pain, Nordic landscapes.
At a time in which art shows tend toward the massive; jam-packed galleries swarming with fat-upper-armed women loaded with streams of banalities, New York has been granted a reprieve at the MoMA by an artist best known for the now-stolen painting “The Scream”.
Like the juiciest of farts, the relieving and incredibly human production of The Playboy of the Western World arouses in the depths of your belly that sort of visceral, ancient laughter perhaps only possible and appropriate in Irish villages. It’s … Read More
“TRUST but verify,” goes the Old Russian proverb, and such a maxim can apply to the Guggenheim’s current “RUSSIA!” exhibit, which seems to require further probing – further verification – to find the reason for the obvious compensation attempted by using all capital letters and an exclamation point in its title.
Jed Peterson ’06 has created an epic version of the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet – so creative and grand that his remains the best Shakespeare performed at Princeton in the past few years and the best play … Read More
When I meet Howard Nuer ’07, a Hassidic Jewish student, three Sundays ago in his room, I am struck most by his bookshelf—filled to the gills with advanced math books and Hebrew scripture. The math major sits relaxed at his … Read More
A French damsel and I decided to take a train To New York to see the Gates and be at play. You were late to the Dinky and had to book It to meet me by the stop to pause, … Read More
Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something. -Pancho Villa, last words Let my last words be “good night” Even if I don’t have time to utter them As a Mercedes truck smushes me Under the moon … Read More
Bereavement can be rather grave in certain circumstances, and the loss of decorum- the circumstance I address this very instant- has its sufficient fill of seriousness.
If anyone can pull off the role of satirical, socio-political prophet and shnooky belletrist, it’s Gary Shteyngart. The author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Shteyngart is one of the punchiest and funniest young novelists out there. His writing, colored and coarsened by the blunt cynicism of his 1970s upbringing in the Soviet Union, draws on intricate tessellations of classic Russian literature, self-deprecating Semitic humor, and current global politics. Being a Jew born in 1972 in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union and having immigrated to Queens in 1979, he has achieved status as a perpetual outsider, who can observe from remove and criticize with greater perspicacity.
Cocksure I stand that this lesbian play has become the first theatrical hit to reach Princeton this school year.
How fine it is to go to the theater and find yourself in a proper Boston living room, replete with pomp and circumstance. But take this turn of the 20th century propriety and subvert it with the sexual lewdness of nowadays; mix in marital deceit and seduction of a young lass by a voluptuous lesbian, and you’ll get the formula for David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, the first play of the Theatre Intime season.