Theater

2009

This Small Extravagance

James Longenbach : Biography

Writing a biography of the mind of Shakespeare is a challenge that requires the ingenuity of an artist.
Violent Grace

Emily Wilson

Anne Carson's An Oresteia offers a dark vision of violent grace.
The Leavetaking

Richard Byrne : The Short of It

What legacy did Harold Pinter leave behind?
Hammerheads

Alisa Solomon

As David Mamet's views become more Manichaean, he's squared the jaws of his tough guys.
Pinter: Bare-Knuckled Citizen Playwright

Margaret Spillane : Human Rights

In the end, Harold Pinter devoted himself to defining "the real truth of our lives and our societies." Now that he's gone, his twenty-nine plays will continue that rude, honorable and turbulent work.

Krapp's Last Horse

Akiva Gottlieb : The Short of It

With his new play Kicking a Dead Horse, Sam Shepard is still stranded in a prairie of tough-guy cliché.
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?

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.

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics

US Foreign Policy

The pursuit of truth in drama is elusive, but in life it is mandatory, wrote Harold Pinter, who died Wednesday at 78. When he won the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, he condemned the United States for its actions in Iraq and and called on its citizens to reject the manipulation of political language.