Archive

Theatre Review: Lizzie Borden at Eight O’Clock

Mitch Giannunzio’s one-woman play, Lizzie Borden at Eight O’Clock, is about to finish its March-April 2011 run at the WorkShop Theater Company in Manhattan. The conceit of the play is that a few years after her acquittal for the infamous hatchet murders of her father and her step-mother, and after suffering the gossip and shunning of her townspeople, Lizzie Borden agrees to finally tell all for a Fall River Historical Society fund-raiser. She will identify the real murderer. That makes the audience for this monodrama enact the roles of the people of Fall River, including

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March 27, 2011

Theatre Review: Kings: The Siege of Troy

Kings: The Siege of Troy, an adaptation by Jim Milton of Christopher Logue’s wonderful poem entitled Kings, is ending its run this week (March 2011) at Manhattan’s Workshop Theatre. Handcart Ensemble, Verse Theater Manhattan, and WorkShop Theatre Company collaborated in this production, not that I know exactly what role each played. This was a fine, engaging production. The simple lighting, bare stage, and street clothing allowed the language and acting to dominate. Logue’s work retells in free verse the stories from books I and II of the 24-book Iliad by Homer. Logue has offered “an

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March 27, 2011

Why the UK army wanted to fight in Afghanistan

If there is a good reason for America’s continuing war in Afghanistan, I have not yet heard it.  On the other hand, there are several bad reasons to continue the war, enough to assure us that it will go on. The British have already figured out that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were blunders, that Tony Blair misled his country, that the UK economy cannot afford to continue the war, and that the wars have damaged their forces. Maybe some day we Americans will face those truths, too. The national interests of the UK

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January 19, 2011

Film Review: Another Year

I expected to like Mike Leigh’s Another Year more than I did, my expectations raised in part because it is small scale and character-driven, because director Mike Leigh is a good filmmaker, and because some critics (e.g. A.O. Scott and Liam Lacey) report that the film has a serious central theme, happiness. But despite its several virtues, I found the film mostly tedious and shallow. A film’s theme isn’t necessarily happiness in general just because half of the characters are miserable and half are happy. Another Year leaves the largest questions of happiness to philosophers,

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January 18, 2011

Veterans and Classroom Discipline

The new Conservative government in the United Kingdom has released its plan for education reform. The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper 2010 (pdf available here) outlines the plans of Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Education. The report broadly suggests decentralizing and reducing curriculum requirements (eliminating tangential subjects while setting higher standards for core skills) and it recognizes the problem of inequities. Whether we agree or not with all of the premises and proposals, we all wish Michael Gove and UK schoolchildren well. As the title suggests, the reforms concentrate on

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November 25, 2010

Frank Caprio Tells Obama to “Shove It”

Economic and war news is so grim that Americans are fortunate if they can sometimes enjoy politics as theatre, as a small compensation for all the suffering and destruction that politicians cause. Politics is indeed very expensive entertainment, but since we are paying for it whether or not we enjoy it, we might as well enjoy it. This requires seeing most politicians as fools, not just knaves. Americans could at least laugh at George W. Bush’s chuckleheaded clownishness as he doubled the national debt to $10 trillion and arrogated imperial powers while decrying big government.

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October 29, 2010

Film Review: Lebanon

Samuel Maoz has made a brilliant film in Lebanon, unless you are in the mood for a happy ending, feel-good confirmation that all is well. Leaving Lebanon, the viewer is not happily humming the theme song, but hearing echoes of the insistent, chaotic noise of war. Lebanon follows one Israeli tank during the first day and night of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The best movies tell their stories and make their points visually, and Samuel Maoz demonstrates in Lebanon that he knows not only this principle, but enough art history to enrich his choices.

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August 16, 2010

Book Review: Jensen-Stevenson, Spite House

OK, footnotes might seem boring, and they might frighten some potential book buyers, but any book concerning the controversy over Robert Garwood needs rigorous footnotes identifying the source or sources of various assertions. In Spite House (1997), the few footnotes are really odd; some minor matters are footnoted, major matters are not. The footnotes appear to have been tacked on, not by the author, and clearly not scrutinized by any editor. The primary source appears to be Col. Tom McKenney. Now, he is probably a fine and honest man, but I suspect his assertions need

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July 4, 2010

Book Review: Alan Farrell, Expended Casings

In his foreword (whimsically rendered “Deployed Forward”), Alan Farrell ridicules pretension, incomprehensibility, poetry as therapy, literary critical jargon, posturing, the cult of free verse, swingebuckling, and shallow war poetry cliches. Nevertheless you sense that he is trying to be restrained and polite, and barely succeeding. Farrell’s reader might then expect carefully crafted and elegantly ironic poems like many of the best World War II work, but the poems in Expended Casings better evoke rondeaus, with their song-like structures, and Kipling ballads, with Farrell’s skillful use of demotic GI language and the grotesque humor of the

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July 4, 2010

Book Review: William Logan, The Undiscovered Country

Poetry is the only art form in America that I can think of that no longer has a bracing tradition of real criticism. Novels, plays, films, operas . . . we expect critics to note honestly whatever flaws and failures they see in specific works. Critical reviews often hurt sales and egos, but without them an art atrophies. Some people attribute the lack of critical poetry reviews to pusillanimity, an unwillingness to offend others in the small poetry world, where grants, jobs, and publication opportunities might be at risk. The cause might instead merely be

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July 4, 2010
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