Theater

Back Talk: John Turturro

Christine Smallwood

Actor John Turturro discusses his latest project, a production of Beckett's Endgame at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Tom Stoppard's Schlock 'n' Roll

J. Gabriel Boylan : The Short of It

When will we stop living in the '60s?

2007

Waiting for Godot in a Wasteland

Billy Sothern : New Orleans

The most devastated neighborhood in America makes an ideal backdrop for a morally ambiguous play about abandonment.
Nixon's Broadway Revival

Elizabeth Drew : Cultural Criticism & Analysis

Peter Morgan's new play is highly entertaining; Frank Langella's portrait of Nixon is brutally amusing; yet the play is historically inaccurate.
A Dangerous Little Beehive?

Rosa Miriam Elizalde : Cuba

A Cuban children's troupe has performed around the globe but finds it almost impossible to enter the United States.
Liberalism's Lost Libretto

Eric Alterman : History

Tom Stoppard's epic Coast of Utopia speaks as much to the state of the American left as it does to the roots of Russia's revolution.

Beckett at 100

Margaret Spillane : Books, Literature, & Ideas

No playwright has given plainer witness to the planet's most violent century or borne such loving witness to the dispossessed.
The World According to Karen Finley

Bryan Farrell : Books

Performance artist Karen Finley answers questions about politics, satire and her new book, a fantasy affair between George W. Bush and Martha Stewart.
Too Hot for New York

Philip Weiss : Israel

My Name Is Rachel Corrie was a big hit in London, but the New York Theatre Workshop backed off from producing the play. Why is it so hard for Americans to have a healthy debate about Palestinian human rights?
Bad Will Hunting

Daniel Swift : Biography

Two new books on Shakespeare examine his shadowy life, his times and the origins of his imagination. A third explores whether the Bard of Avon was, in fact, Edward de Vere.

Art, Truth and Politics

Harold Pinter : US Foreign Policy

In his lecture to the Swedish Academy December 7, Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter excoriated the United States for hubris and manipulations of the truth over decades of abusive foreign policy, in particular the Bush Administration's war in Iraq. Here is the full text of his lecture.
I Act, Therefore I Am

David Thomson : Film

Admired from a distance and reviled up close, Laurence Olivier could establish a relation with his audience that was like an infection. His official biography chronicles a personal life of an actor who altered the cultural compass of a nation.
The Most Revolutionary Art Form

Ishaan Tharoor : Afghanistan

Can a vibrant and cosmopolitan artistic scene help heal the wounds of Afghanistan's traumatic past?
Kushner on Miller

Tony Kushner

The politics of a progressive playwright.