Category Archives: Commentary

WHERE CIVILIANS ARE HUNTED, THEATER ENDURES: KHERSON HOSTS INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL · Sep 13th

(Myroslava Makarevych’s article appeared in the Kyiv Post, 9/6/26; Photo: Destruction of the theater as a result of enemy shelling. (Credit via the M. Kulish Kherson Regional Academic Music and Drama Theater.) The 28th Melpomena Tavrii International Theatre Festival will take place Sept. 12–19 under its longstanding motto, #TheaterWhereWeAre. Despite Russia’s war, the festival will return to Kherson, with performances also staged in Mykolaiv and at participating theaters across Ukraine.

Founded in 1999, Melpomena Tavrii has presented 610 productions by around 230 theaters from more than 100 cities and more than 20 countries.

Kyiv Post spoke with festival president and artistic director of the Mykola Kulish Kherson Theatre Oleksandr Knyha about why the festival continues in one of Ukraine’s most dangerous cities, what theater means to Kherson residents today and why keeping the stage alive has become an act of resistance.

Oleksandr Knyha. (Photo via the M. Kulish Kherson Regional Academic Music and Drama Theater) 

Kyiv Post: Melpomena Tavrii continues despite the war, and in extremely difficult conditions. Why is it so important to keep the festival in Kherson?

Oleksandr Knyha: In 2022, after we escaped occupied Kherson, I wrote on social media: “Melpomena will definitely take place in Ukrainian Kherson. Despite everything!”

As soon as the city was liberated, we returned and began restoring the theater. Our team was scattered across Ukraine and Europe, while some people remained in occupied Kherson. We created a format that allowed our friends to participate and, most importantly, helped us tell the world what was happening in our city.

The theater itself has been badly damaged. How do you work under these conditions?

We no longer work in our theater building because it is in a red zone. It has been heavily damaged and shelled, and we are trying to save it. Practically no windows remain. The roof is badly damaged.

On March 8, 2026, a rocket from a multiple-launch rocket system hit the theater roof. Had it landed about 10 centimeters higher, it would have hit the auditorium.

The team told me, “Let’s cancel the program. Nobody will come.”

I said, “No. We won’t cancel it. Even if one person comes, it will be therapy for that person.”

And the auditorium was full.

It turned out that even being destroyed, even having bombs falling around us, is not enough to stop us. We are needed.

People come to us like to a source – to drink healing water and keep going.

 

The play “D.I.M.” (Photo via the M. Kulish Kherson Regional Academic Music and Drama Theater) 

So theater has become a form of psychological support?

Yes. I don’t want to use overly grand words, but it really is a mission. It is our duty and our responsibility to people.

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IN SUPPORT OF THE FOURTH WALL: PROSCENIUM ARCH THEATRE’S SURPRISINGLY RADICAL HISTORY · Sep 11th

(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/11/2026. Vaulted ambition … the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. Photograph: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images.)

Dominic Dromgoole’s new book, Time Frames, shows how this format’s stuffy reputation belies the room it has made for daring experiments from Chekhov to Brecht and beyond

How do you make theatre history come alive? One way is through creating lists backed up by quirky essays. I tried that myself in The 101 Greatest Plays, which is one reason why I’m in awe of Dominic Dromgoole who, in Time Frames extends the possibilities of the format and comes up with a book that is passionate, personal, informative and argumentative. It just seems unfair that a director should outperform most of us critics.

He starts with the advantage of a strong framework. His book covers the years from 1865 to 1965, when the proscenium theatre was dominant, and deals with more than 70 playwrights. Today we celebrate the limitless possibilities of theatre with open, apron, traverse and circular stages but Dromgoole enthuses over a time when plays were mainly enclosed behind a proscenium arch. He describes the form as “liberatingly restrictive” like the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues and he has a point.

We associate the proscenium with the good-mannered, well-made play but it also gave birth to Chekhov’s work for the Moscow Art theatre, Brecht’s revolutionary ideas in East Berlin and, closer to home, Joan Littlewood’s radical populism at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the explosion of energy at the Royal Court. Seizing on the closely crafted, socially critical plays of John Galsworthy, Dromgoole says they are perfect examples of the proscenium paradox: “entertainment encasing dysfunction”.

While charting the proscenium century Dromgoole also forces us to question existing assumptions. One of his great discoveries, initially unearthed in a book by Maggie Gale, is that between the wars 21% of West End plays were written by women: a considerably better ratio than later times. This leads Dromgoole to examine a whole host of neglected female writers. He shows how Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement dealt seriously with the problem of men returning from war still saturated in violence. He makes a strong case for Dodie Smith whose Dear Octopus was recently revived at the National but whose Call It a Day, with its “shamelessness about unbridled female desire”, sounds even more fascinating. He suggests that sex was also at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s achievement in rarely seen plays such as September Tide and The Years Between. He also rediscovers Alice Childress, an American playwright who was a big influence on Lorraine Hansberry and whose 1955 play, Trouble in Mind, dealt with the tension between a black female actor and a white male director.

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CONSTANT STANISLAVSKI (174) · Sep 9th

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

(To the actor: ) You must not think (your roles) out ‘somehow,’ or ‘in general,’ or ‘approximately,’ because all those terms do not hold in art.  You must do it with all the details proper to such a large undertaking.  Always remain in close contact with logic and coherence.  This will help you to hold unsubstantial and slippery dreams close to steady solid facts.  (AP)

***** KING LEAR REVIEW – IAN MCDIARMID IS A TITANIC, HEARTBREAKING WONDER · Sep 7th

(Mark Lawson’s article appeared in the Guardian; From emperor to king … Ian McDiarmid as Lear at the Crucible theatre. Photograph: Johan Persson)

Crucible theatre, Sheffield

The 82-year-old actor gives a performance of absolute authenticity and clarity as the erratic demagogue in a uniformly impressive production

The word “nothing” is spoken four times in four lines in the opening scene of King Lear, among 30 uses across the play. This feels the key to Titus Halder’s Sheffield Crucible staging, which really makes something of nothingness, crowned by an unusually age-appropriate performer as the “fourscore and upward” English king: 82-year-old Ian McDiarmid.

The dark pit of Richard Kent’s design might be a nuclear after-blast. Like Peter Brook’s mid 20th-century stage and film versions, in a previous era of existentialist international tension, the interpretation radiates terminal uncertainty. Characters address pleas and prayers to “the gods” in the direction identified with heaven but with a growing knowing that nothing is there.

It is also clear that the kingdom Lear ruinously tries to divide between his three daughters is already past its rule-by date, probably due to his eccentric leadership. In a moment of apparent clarity during his mental decline, Lear says, “I will be jovial”, and this often unremarked line seems the base note to McDiarmid’s titanic performance.

Fode Simbo as Edmund and Katie Wimpenny as Goneril. Photograph: Johan Persson

Giggling dirtily when speculating about his daughters having “issue”, he grins manically out of sync with situations. His threat to inflict “terrors” on the world even though he “does not know yet” what they are is not, as often, the forgetfulness of dementia but political bullshitting that wins a knowing laugh from the audience. Leaving his court unsure what he will say or do next, the erratic head of state is also transactional, giving real chill to the dismissal of the banished Cordelia: “Her price has fallen.”

But, while it might be no surprise if this Lear suddenly imposed tariffs on France, the portrait of power is much broader: this demagogue, unfashionably, admits fault and reaches forgiveness.

The acting paradox of Lear is that the textual extreme physical frailty must co-exist with the ability to carry Cordelia’s corpse and the vocal depth to serve the dense poetry. Because of this, middle-aged actors are often cast.

 birth-date realism raises obvious risks, McDiarmid perfectly combines bodily authenticity (the problem of transporting the dead daughter cleverly sidestepped) with absolute verbal clarity on the required range from explosion to self-reflective emotion. When Lear’s heart broke, so did mine.

(Read more)

‘QUEENSBRIDGE’ BY MARLIN THOMAS (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Sep 1st

By Bob Shuman

Queensbridge, by Marlin Thomas (now playing at Theater for the New City’s Dream Up Festival, until 9/13–schedule below), is a history of disenfranchisement, an embrace of the rejected: evictions, robberies, murders, exhaustion—a pileup of the disremembered. What unites the characters—for they are real people, in real life, across generations–is their government housing complex, Queensbridge, just a ride away on the F train in NYC, to Queens—actually, the largest group of residential housing in North America, with 7,000 tenants: missing fathers, broken families, discrimination, unemployment, unpaid rent, dislocations, and soul abandonment, drugs. Urban planning on steroids.

 

The play is a gauge of acceptance and shame; its set, in the TNC lower-level Cabaret theater, is only six second-hand chairs—but its lackluster washed-out setting is a microcosm of seating for multitudes. A table. A laptop. A projection of the greenery at the entrance to the apartments, where a jazz bass is playing. DeMone Seaphin has directed the ensemble for choreographic, double-fisted acting (theater students might want to become aware of the scenes and monologues, in Queensbridge, for auditions). American pain. The narrator, Pharaoh (Lionel Russell) looks directly at us, yet the impression is not one of discomfort or intimidation, from the audience’s point of view, but rather, of witnessing. His wingman is Jeremy (Jamil Denard Jr.): he’s a big young man (a very big young man)—wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley. But, to his credit, he does love his Mama.

Thomas is embracing everything society wants to reject—the people we move away from on mass transit, the errant, from New York public schools—where little more than half of students, from grades 3-8 are proficient in English or math (and the cost per student is the highest in the country: $35, 796 per pupil in 2024). Wait till they have to do paperwork. The temptation is to see Queensbridge in terms of the past—through the genius of James Baldwin or Claude Brown. Even Thomas might be called by the faraway designation of neorealist, a documentary investigator, examining the intersection of poverty and social reality. The uncomfortable truth, which doesn’t seem to have a genre yet, is the unappealing recognition, that people belong to machines, are tuned out, long gone. Right now: compliant, distracted, or listless—some sociologist’s success story somewhere must have been to keep the subways quiet and, possibly, safer.

Devices; muscle shirts; rings; necklaces; sunglasses in the collar openings;  small earphones, not buds; flowers, a florist balloon; in a row, under the grab rails: brand-new running and walking shoes; sandals; shorts; jeans; baseball hats; t-shirts; a man kisses his son on the head; acne scars on a wide face. The first sight of a tattoo is at 42nd Street; green hair at 8th Street. How can all that life be so humbled?

Maybe Thomas knows all that. He’s talking to me, in the theater lobby: “If you want to shout or make noise, during the performance, go ahead.” A woman keeps saying, “O.K.” (near the box office). Thomas has actually lived at Queensbridge, this monstrosity, most of his life. He writes about the honor a young person can try to have, even when there is nothing.  He also writes about the luxury of honor.  A “wonderful” call comes in: “A lady saw Queensbridge last night: Just wanted to tell you how she loved the performance.” Yet the characters may be the people we must move away from on mass transit (Deric Gochenauer’s enactment of motor stereotypy, or the like), similar to the co-dependent women in Tennessee Williams’s visceral play The Mutilated (that feeling of stale booze and sweat, you want to take a shower after seeing). Queensbridge, is comparable, also, to Grenfell, the story of the tower apartments fire, which ripped through low-income housing, in London, in 2017, the basis of Gillian Slovo’s 2023 verbatim play. Queensbridge, however, is smaller, more pent up.

Ashley Victoria Scott, is the quilter, Mrs.  Treadway, in the drama, a poignant role: “No one’s telling my story but me”; “white people writing about black people don’t seem right.” The petty thieves, thugs of the Manfredos (played by Gochenauer and Levi Buckmaster, as Tony—he’s carrying a baseball bat). Mr. Rosenberg (Sheldon Young) sees money can be made, hauling goods floor to floor. The bureaucrat (Wayne Miller): the Voice of NYCHA. A young woman of today, the Interviewer, getting an A for her academic project on the development complex, the projects, the low-income housing (Sherell Williams). What’s stable for a kid in the world of public housing? Not the Bungalow ice cream truck, which stopped coming. Not the fire hydrants, on a hot summer like this, which you can’t break into and turn on yourself anymore. Only the cops will come consistently, when a fire alarm is pulled.

O.K.

I am talking to a public librarian now, in the Bronx, who is agreeing with my choice of a two-year lease renewal—he did the same recently, a time-saver. He thinks it’s less of a hassle with the landlord. Summer is the busiest rental and moving season in the city, but nothing is changing in Queensbridge.

I should say that I recommend the show;  it is the kind of work, with a social vision, which I find important.

I am also writing to Ms. LaSalle, at the New York Department of Finance, to renew a Rent Freeze: “I hope you are well. I am sending you my new lease (a two year lease), effective 11/1, 2026 through 10/31, 2028, so that my Rent Freeze records can be updated . . .

I have decided to stay, in my current apartment, two more years.”

(c) 2026 by Bob Shuman. All rights reserved.

Visit Theater for the New City. 

“Queensbridge” by Marlin Thomas, directed by DeMone Seraphin

World Premiere, 75 min.

Cabaret Theater, $15

8/29@ 8:00 PM, 8/30 @ 2:00 PM, 8/30 5:00 PM, 9/5 @ 5:00 PM, 9/8 @ 9:00 PM, 9/10 @ 6:30 PM, 9/11 @ 9:00 PM, 9/12 5:00 PM, 9/13 @ 2:00 PM

Queensbridge is the largest public housing project in North America.This production renders it through an oral history project that became a play.

During an oral history interview, a decades-long resident of the nation’s largest housing project recounts the trauma of living there, his complicity in it, and his attempt at redemption.  A man called Pharaoh holds court for an interviewer recording the history of his home. Around him, the neighbors of six decades return. Each interview is a record of how a person arrives in a place like this and what the place makes of them. The play is political but not partisan. Threaded through every memory is the Voice of NYCHA — the smooth, official account of the development, contradicted line-by-line by the people who actually lived there.  https://QueensbridgeStagePlay.US

 

THE DOWNFALL OF SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK · Aug 29th

(Annie Levin’s article appeared in the Compact, 8/27; Photo: Joan Marcus/ The Public Theater.)

For decades, the free outdoor summer performances put on by Manhattan’s Public Theater have been a pillar of New York City’s cultural scene. The New York Shakespeare Festival, now called Free Shakespeare in the Park, launched the careers of Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, and George C. Scott; many other notable figures of the stage and the screen have appeared in its acclaimed performances since it was launched in 1954 by the theater artist Joseph Papp. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn in 1921, Papp believed that live theater should be as accessible as the public library. With a thirty-five-foot trailer attached to a decommissioned sanitation truck, he and his company brought Shakespeare to the people for free.

When he first rolled his trailer to Central Park’s Turtle Pond, Papp could hardly have imagined what the festival would become in 2026: the Blade helicopters droning past as the festival’s director of fundraising thanks Citizens Bank and other corporate sponsors for their generous contributions; productions like last summer’s star-studded Twelfth Night, which recast the beloved comedy as a cartoonish spectacle, part Shen Yun Circus and part Spongebob musical.  

The first production in this summer’s season was a bilingual Romeo and Juliet set at the US-Mexico border wall. No English supertitles were provided for non-Spanish-speaking audience members, nor Spanish supertitles for the non-English-speakers in the crowd. The star-crossed lovers code-switched in and out of Spanish, as in: “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch / And palm to palm the palmer les da un beso.” The laugh lines in Spanish elicited obligatory titters from perhaps a fifth of the audience. The rest maintained a guilty, awkward silence.

Juliet’s balcony scene was staged on a guard tower on the border wall. The Montagues, a Spanish-speaking family of indigenous activists from the wrong side of the wall, staged a campus-style “Abolish ICE” banner drop; the Capulets were border guards, dressed like goose-stepping blackshirts. Transposing contemporary politics onto Shakespeare can, in theory, offer a fruitful way of reimagining the play, but the politics here were slapped on and made little sense. The Montagues and Capulets are “two families, both alike in dignity” battling over ancient grudges; the tragic deaths of the young protagonists prompt them to recognize the meaninglessness of the rivalry and reconcile. The new production’s desperate bid for relevance generated an incoherent statement with little relation to the text, turning a tragic love story about fate, love, and destructive enmity into a black and white morality tale. 

(Read more)

INFLUENTIAL HUMANISTS: THE WINNERS OF THE GOETHE MEDAL 2026 · Aug 28th

(Elizabeth Grenier’s report appeared on DW, 8/28. Agents of intercultural dialogue: documentary theater director Prodromos Tsinikoris)

The prestigious German cultural award recognizes the artistic work and commitment to cultural dialogue of Arvo Pärt, Anita Raja and Prodromos Tsinikoris.

Prodromos Tsinikoris: Documentary theater as a bridge between cultures

Born in the West German city of Wuppertal in 1981 as the son of Greek labor migrants, Prodromos Tsinikoris is one of the leading voices in contemporary Greek and European theater.

As a theater director, actor and dramaturg, he creates documentary productions exploring the themes of migration, social inequality and historical perspectives.

Goethe Medal 2026 for Prodromos Tsinikoris

His audio walk “In the middle of the street” centers on homeless people during Greece’s financial crisis.

The documentary theater production “Clean City,” co-created with Anestis Azas, focuses onthe lives of migrant cleaners, juxtaposing their personal testimonies with the rhetoric of neo-fascist movements who want to “clean” Greece of its foreigners and refugees.

In the play “96%” Tsinikoris deals with the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki and the looting of their property during the Nazi occupation.

From 2015 to 2020, Tsinikoris directed the Experimental Stage at the National Theater in Athens. Today, he is co-curator of the International Forest Festival in Thessaloniki and teaches at the National Theater’s directing school in Athens.

Many of Tsinikoris’ plays have been developed and presented in Germany. His work has also circulated broadly across Europe, particularly through documentary theater festivals and major public theaters.

Edited by: Brenda Haas

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HOW HARRY POTTER HELPED A UKRAINIAN POW SURVIVE 4 YEARS IN RUSSIAN CAPTIVITY o · Aug 26th

(Yulia Zhukova’s report appeared on Radio Liberty/ Radio Free Europe 8/25/26.)

For four years in Russian captivity, Ukrainian marine Oleksandr Ivanov retold the entire Harry Potter series from memory to his fellow prisoners. The defender of Mariupol says the stories gave them something to look forward to. After his release in a prisoner exchange, Ivanov received a letter from the author of the books, J.K. Rowling. But, he says, he wishes he had never had a reason to receive it.

DOLLY PARTON (1946-2026) · Aug 26th

(Caroline Sullivan’s article appeared in the Guardian, 8/25/2026; Photo: Thomas Funeral Home.)

Glamorous and astute singer-songwriter whose bountiful talent had an appeal reaching far beyond her country roots

The singer Dolly Parton, who has died aged 80 after suffering from cancer, had a ready fund of quips, most mercilessly self-deprecating. “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap” was perhaps the most famous, and undoubtedly the one that best captured her appetite for glitz and mischief. Bountiful talent as a singer and songwriter was the bedrock of her success, but her wit and maximalist approach also charmed the public. She was a much-loved figure even to those who knew none of her music apart from the huge hits Jolene and I Will Always Love You: at the Glastonbury festival in 2014, she attracted what was reportedly the largest crowd in its history.

“Borderline absurd” was the Guardian’s approving verdict on that show, during which Parton tooted a rhinestone saxophone and improvised a song called Mud (her crystal-studded white suit survived the weather unsullied). But that was just a workaday gig for a character who was always “on” in public. Ebullient and warm by nature, she created a persona that had no real precedent in country music – she was a fantasy figure who was also very real. The exterior fakery, modelled on “a whore or a high-class prostitute, not even so much high-class”, as she told Rolling Stone in 1980, was grounded by deep intelligence and honesty. 

While many of her songs covered classic misery territory – shamed single mothers, sickly children – she was the anomalous star whose own life was happy. Once she was able to, she helped others: from 1988, local schoolchildren, from 1995, through a book reading programme that went international, and later with aid for people affected by wildfires and hurricanes, and medical research. Parton’s appeal was multi-generational and boundary-defying; one of the first country stars to cross over, she played a major role in taking the genre into the mainstream.

She often used her figure to her advantage, saying in 2010: “I developed fast and by the time I was 15 or 16, I realised the effect it had on men.” She ignored advice to play down the sexiness, feeling it an expression of her natural ebullience. Maximising it by wearing clothes cut to emphasise what the New Yorker called “breasts like launching missiles” probably did not hurt her chances when she moved to Nashville at 18 to find a record deal. She was soon taken on as a songwriter by Combine Publishing, and at 19 signed by Monument Records as an artist.

Despite getting a foot on the ladder quickly, she came up against Nashville’s then-characteristic treatment of female singers. They were viewed as adjuncts to men, as Parton experienced during eight years from 1967 as sidekick to the musician Porter Wagoner on his popular TV variety show.

Becoming a familiar television face had only a middling effect on her record sales at first – her own releases were usually outsold by the 20 duets she released with Wagoner. The last laugh in their partnership was hers, however. Leaving in 1974 to go fully solo, she wrote I Will Always Love You as a farewell to him. It was successful as a single for her, and attracted the attention of Elvis Presley, who wanted to record it but demanded 50% of the publishing rights. She refused, and had cause to be glad she did. Covered by Whitney Houston for the soundtrack to her film The Bodyguard in 1992, it became one of the best-selling singles of all time, earning Parton enough, she said, “to buy Graceland”.

Wagoner had invited her to join the show when he heard Dumb Blonde (1967), her first song to reach the charts. It admonished those who failed to see past her flashy facade: “Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb / ’Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” Once she had invented the persona, she was always the first to joke about it, even titling a 2008 album Backwoods Barbie. There were endless gags about whether she was supporting her breasts or they were supporting her, and even more about their effect on others: “They were holding me backstage – they kept wanting to see my IDs. Well, I think they wanted to see IDs – maybe it was just double-Ds,” she told the audience at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild awards, where she presented Lily Tomlin with a lifetime achievement award.

The sharp brain under the platinum wig calculated how much bawdiness she could ladle on, but it was her ability as a singer, writer and multi-instrumentalist that made her Nashville’s best-known female export. A soprano with a remarkable vibrato and east Tennessee twang, she could sound airy or weighed down by sorrow; either way, her voice was among the most recognisable in music. It fetched her 10 Grammy awards, 11 from the Academy of Country Music and numerous others, including a Golden Raspberry for worst original song from a film. The offending item was a track called Drinkenstein, written by Parton for the 1984 comedy Rhinestone, but performed by its star, Sylvester Stallone.

Her childhood sounds like the plot of a country song, which it was – the singles Coat of Many Colors (1971) and My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973) were based on her early years in the isolated Smoky Mountains hamlet of Locust Ridge. She was born in the small town of Pittman Center and raised “in a little log cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River”, the fourth of 11 children (a 12th, Larry, died soon after birth) of Avie Lee (nee Owens) and Robert Lee Parton. Her part-Cherokee mother kept house and her father was a tobacco farmer and sometime construction worker.

(Read more)

DEFIANT IRANIAN FILM SPOTLIGHTS CRACKDOWN ON FEMALE SINGERS · Aug 22nd

(Parisa Sohbati and Will Tizard’s article appeared on Radio Liberty/ Radio Free Europe, 8/22.)

An unauthorized Iranian film released for free on YouTube is stirring debate by openly challenging restrictions on women singing and Iran’s compulsory hijab rules. Bidad, or Outcry, directed by Soheil Beiraghi, was made without government approval and features the voice of Parastoo Ahmadi, a singer who was sentenced to 74 lashes after performing publicly without a head scarf. Parisa Sohbati from RFE/RL’s Negah-e-Farda (Iran Tomorrow) program explains.