Stephen Sossaman

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden is another casualty, in the broadest sense of that word, of whatever Washington is now calling what used to be called the War on Terror, or the Long War. Like American soldiers and Afghan suicide bombers, Edward Snowden knew the personal risks and accepted them to serve what he considered a higher purpose. No one can fault a government for prosecuting a Bradley Manning or an Edward Snowden if they violate laws so as to damage the national interest. But everyone should criticize inhumane treatment, prosecutorial misconduct, misuse of classification laws, the increased

October 24, 2013

Theatre review: God of Carnage

The Napa Playhouse just completed its run of Yasmina Reza’s 2009 play, God of Carnage, and they did very well. God of Carnage might have been aptly entitled A Delicate Balance, if Edward Albee had not already used that for another play with a similar thematic interest. Albee’s play uneasily reveals the fragile, delicate balance of human relationships. In Albee’s world, maintaining a modest level of unhappiness requires vigilance, sacrifice, restraint, humility — and sometimes humiliation. Albee’s characters seem to have a greater capacity for suffering than Reza’s, for suffering deeper than the sting of

February 26, 2013

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry

For poets, one of the best prophylactics against staleness and provincialism is a nice, plump anthology of poems translated from another culture. We welcome The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry and The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry in part for easing our access to a remarkably wide range of poetry arguably more deeply influenced and enriched by international and regional influence than is poetry in the United States. My review of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry will appear in the Fall/Winter 2012-13 issue of Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com). Perhaps a

September 10, 2012

Michael Casey’s Check Points poetry

Michael Casey has once again offered his readers a collection of amusing, deceptively simple poems about daily life as a military policeman during the Viet Nam War, in Check Points, published by Gary Metras’s Adastra Press, 2011. Unlike many contemporary books of poetry (books that gather unrelated poems, loaded with enough filler to remind me of 1970s record albums), Check Points works as an assemblage, its whole greater than its individual poems. Still, several poems here invite rereading and meditation. I count among them “personal effects,” “pentagon,” “bagley removes a thought,” “victor,” and “be afraid,

August 9, 2012

Theatre Review: O’Neill’s The Early Plays

Richard Maxwell’s February 2012 production of The Early Plays (three Eugene O’Neill one-acts) at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, in cooperation with The Wooster Group, seems to me baffling and unsuccessful. The plays themselves are very weak and very dated. They lack effective central themes, relying instead on the novelty (a century ago) of a slice-of-life look at unlikely stage characters, rough and tumble sailors who quarrel and drink too much. A press release suggests that The Early Plays “explores themes of longing and eternity,” but press releases are known to be generous. “Mr. Maxwell

February 19, 2012

Theatre Review: Krapp’s Last Tape

By far the best theatre I have seen in years is Krapp’s Last Tape, performed by John Hurt in a production created by the Gate Theatre in Dublin and brought to Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a brief run in November and December of 2011. John Hurt in the Gate production of Krapp’s Last Tape Photo Anthony Woods Michael Colgan directed and James McConnell designed the light. While my guess is that an actor probably needs greater skill to play Lear or Hamlet than Krapp, John Hurt’s performance seems so great

December 19, 2011

Theatre Review: Julius Caesar

Briefly playing in New York as part of the 2011 Lincoln Center Festival, The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Julius Caesar is an energetic version that emphasizes mise en scene rather than the text, and thus emphasizes the outsize political consequences of political power struggles. Personally, I prefer emphasis on language to spectacle, but spectacle is done very well here. I enjoyed this production immensely, because its successful moments were solid and its weaker aspects, as I see them, are both consonant with the director’s apparent intentions and interesting to those of us who want

August 1, 2011

Film Review: Tied to a Chair

I found this quirky comedy quite entertaining. Tied to a Chair tells a story about how relentlessly an actor can pursue artistic fulfillment, or maybe just a job. The film follows the opening adventures of a middle aged woman responding to a mid-life crisis. Naomi, who gave up hopes of a theatre career to marry a stuffy British civil servant, is known wrongly to her husband as an incompetent because of her domestic inadequacies, whole days being spent ruining dinner and breaking antiques. In fact, however, Naomi is an accomplished fixer, as writer-director Michael Bergmann

May 29, 2011

Film Review: Octubre

The fine reviewer for The Village Voice, J. Hoberman, sees Octubre as an “exploration of a potentially redemptive male midlife crisis.” There is something to this view, of course. Surely many people have found themselves one day at the dining room table wondering how they ended up in a family accreted by the addition of a spouse here and a child there, with strange old people at the table, too, as if they belonged there. But Octubre aims at a broader, more fundamental truth about the human condition than mid-life crises, which are probably better

May 18, 2011

Book Review: Why Translation Matters

In her recently published Why Translation Matters, one of our finest translators, Edith Grossman, expands her three Yale talks to provide a fascinating look at her theory and praxis, while scolding the publishing world. My full review of Why Translation Matters is available at Cerise Press. Cerise Press is one of my favorite on-line publishers of poetry and fiction. If translators operate in one of three basic modes, Grossman prefers the middle ground of the paraphrasts, translating so the reader “will perceive the text, emotionally and artistically, in a manner that parallels and corresponds to,

May 18, 2011

Archive

Edward Snowden

Theatre review: God of Carnage

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry

Michael Casey’s Check Points poetry

Theatre Review: O’Neill’s The Early Plays

Theatre Review: Krapp’s Last Tape

Theatre Review: Julius Caesar

Film Review: Tied to a Chair

Film Review: Octubre

Book Review: Why Translation Matters

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