Minor Quibbles
Well, crap. I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were...
View ArticleQuartet
My wife surprised me yesterday afternoon with the Angels in America soundtrack. “Quartet” accompanies the scene that holds the rare honor of having made me cry two nights in a row. What can I say? Art...
View ArticleBut Is It Funny?
Dale Peck at Slate offers the best critical reading of HBO’s Angels that I’ve found. He points out something that has bothered me a bit as well: the film just isn’t very funny. Which is a shame,...
View ArticleAnd One More Thing
For your reading pleasure: some snippets from Tony Kushner’s commentary on the Klezmatic’s recent CD, Possessed. Parts of the commentary, I noticed, have made their way into his and Alisa Solomon’s...
View ArticleShit Happens
Yesterday at 4:06 pm, I pulled onto the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC — the end of my four hour, 265 mile drive. I know it was 4:06 because that was also the moment that the...
View ArticleAmen, Brother!
Since I started doing interviews, I’ve answered the “preaching to the converted” question more than any other. It seems to me predicated on an unthinking use of the terms “preaching” and “converted.”...
View ArticleMy Dissertation (in the News)
“A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation: In...
View ArticleHuh?
Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner will rewrite Steven Spielberg’s untitled drama about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where members of the Israeli team were held hostage and slain...
View ArticleKushner on Miller
From The Nation: He made it clear in his plays and his essays that his critical thinking and social consciousness had their genesis in the red politics that were pervasive when he was growing up, a...
View ArticleSo Awfully, Irreducibly Real
JOE: Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light. HARPER: No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there. JOE: No one was. HARPER: Maybe actually in the bed, under the...
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