Admissions, by Joshua Harmon, Lincoln Center Theater Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog, New York Theatre Workshop Miles for Mary, by The Mad Ones, Playwrights Horizons People, Places & Things, by Duncan Macmillan, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, by Jocelyn Bioh, MCC Theater
Outstanding Musical
Desperate Measures, The York Theatre Company KPOP, Ars Nova/Ma-Yi Theatre Company/Woodshed Collective Mean Girls Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2b Theatre Company/59E59 SpongeBob SquarePants
Outstanding Revival of a Play
Angels in America Hindle Wakes, Mint Theater Company In the Blood, Signature Theatre Company Three Tall Women Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory/Roundabout Theatre Company
(Grigory Zaslavsky’s article appeared in Russia Beyond the Headlines, 5/31.)
From Fonvizin and Chekhov to Tolstoy, all on stage.
The most famous Russian authors wrote not only voluminous novels but also plays for theater. Most of them retain their relevance and are staged the world over to this day. Russia Beyond asked Grigory Zaslavsky, the prominent theater critic and director of GITIS, the Moscow-based Russian Institute of Theater Arts (one of the biggest theatrical institutions in the world) to compile a list of the most famous Russian plays and suggest the theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg where one can see them.
The Minor, Maly Theater, Moscow
Maly Theater
The first plays for the Russian theater were written in the second half of the 18th century. But their language sounds so archaic to the modern ear that it’s practically impossible to find them in today’s repertoire. But The Minor by Denis Fonvizin is a rare exception. What is more, some quotes from the play are still in use in more or less everyday Russian – for example, the words uttered by the central character, teenager Mitrofanushka: “I don’t want to study, I want to marry.” Today you can see the comedy in Moscow at the Maly Theater.
(from the Folger Shakespeare Library; via Pam Green.)
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 98
In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, Julius Caesar, set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, recently wrote a book about the experience called Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play.
On this podcast episode, he also talks about his early work, his thoughts about race in the British theater, about the proper way to play Brutus, and much more. Paterson Joseph is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.
(Matt Wolf’s article appeared in The New York Times, 5/31; via Pam Green.)
LONDON — Shakespeare’s Globe may have had a spring cleaning, but don’t for a second think that the deservedly popular playhouse is playing it safe.
You could be forgiven for expecting a conservative, back-to-basics approach following the controversial artistic tenure of Emma Rice, who parted company with the theater in 2017 after only two years. But if “As You Like It” and “Hamlet,” the opening productions by the new artistic director, Michelle Terry, are any gauge, the Globe looks poised to continue provoking — albeit in new ways. Already, Ms. Terry’s tenure promises to throw norms to the wind by casting without regard to gender, race or ethnicity. Eyebrows have been raised, but there has been hefty applause as well.
Ms. Rice had ruffled feathers by modernizing a space that Globe hard-liners defend fiercely. They took issue with her use of amplification, contemporary lighting rigs and a pop aesthetic that introduced Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” for instance, into her Bollywood-inflected “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Her “Twelfth Night” included the London drag artist Le Gateau Chocolat as a disco diva Feste.
No less provocative was Ms. Rice’s candid admission that she found Shakespeare difficult — a sentiment she expressed in her first news conference as artistic director and in various interviews.
Ms. Terry, by contrast, has spoken from the outset of an apprenticeship to Shakespeare that began when she was a child. And because she, unlike Ms. Rice, is an actress — and an Olivier Award-winning one at that — she comes to her current position steeped in the playwright’s work. The result is that you feel at every turn a direct engagement with a dramatist whom Ms. Rice, by contrast, sometimes seemed at odds with, as if the verse were an irritation to be overcome.
(Ben Brantley’s and Jesse Green’s article appeared in The New York Times, 6/1; via Pam Green.)
“The Great Work begins.” When we first heard the Angel of America bellow that bulletin as the curtain came down on Part 1 of the play named for her and her band of anxious immortals, many of us who look to the theater for inspiration were, in fact, inspired. Tony Kushner’s “gay fantasia,” fusing the ambition, morality and underdog sympathies of earlier 20th century masters, felt not only like a great American play but like a culmination and reimagining of great American playness. It slammed a door open.
That was 1993. Exactly 25 years later, the first Broadway revival of “Angels in America” started us thinking about what has happened to American plays in the meantime. Have they been as great? Is their greatness different from what it was? Is “greatness” even a meaningful category anymore?
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great Norwegian playwright and poet, best known for his middle class tragedies such as The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People. These are set in a world where the middle class is dominant and explore the qualities of that life, its weaknesses and boundaries and the ways in which it takes away freedoms. It is the women who fare the worst in this society, something Ibsen explored in A Doll’s House among others, a play that created a sensation with audiences shocked to watch a woman break free of her bourgeois family life to find her destiny. He explored dark secrets such as incest and, in Ghosts, hereditary syphilis, which attracted the censors. He gave actresses parts they had rarely had before, and audiences plays that, after Shakespeare, became the most performed in the world.
With
Tore Rem Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr Professor of English and Theatre Studies and Tutorial Fellow, St Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford
And
Dinah Birch Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Cultural Engagement at the University of Liverpool
