Postwar Migration and Black British Theatre

Over the next decade, a growing community of black theatre practitioners emerged in Britain...

He argues that Shakespeare wrote the plays by plagiarizing liberally from North’s earlier works, some of which were published and are now lost...

What is the economic reality of being a singer? How much do singers typically have to invest before they can achieve an adequate living?

Bar Dykes—a forgotten gem written in the early 1980s by Tennessee-based author (and proud butch) Merril Mushroom—is being presented by The Other Side of Silence

When people think of the work of Bob Fosse, Broadway’s foremost choreographer-director in the 1960s and 1970s, what they are likely to see in their minds is a group of dancers, in bowler hats and white gloves..

‘When my daughter thinks of Shakespeare, she’ll be able to imagine Asian American players’

The actor playing Olivia happened to be Asian—the first Asian actor I had ever seen onstage, and one of precious few I’d noticed anywhere.

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan.

Mathias Blum writes in Akiva’s Garden that “No play in the Renaissance canon, no play in the English canon, no play in literature is as terrifying as The Tragedy of Dracule

by Steve Mentz Motion disorients bodies. When they are moved, bodies seek stable refuge—whether the bodies in question comprise shipwrecked sailors, strife-torn nations, dislocated asylum-seekers, or even confused students. Poetry offers a partial, not always effective, response to motion sickness. In disorienting times and places, we imagine refuge—while not averting...

The Year of Kantor

“J.M. Coetzee”

On 21 December, 2012, I had the privilege of introducing J.M. Coetzee to an expectant audience at the University of Cape Town; he was about to read from his new, as yet unpublished work, The Childhood of Jesus.

Discovered Country

Until very recently, I have avoided writing about Hamlet. With the occasional exception, I have also avoided teaching Shakespeare’s most famous play. I might have casually referred to this avoidance as “The Hamlet Effect.”

Samuel Beckett’s classic play Waiting for Godot, written in the author’s own account as some sort of diversion from his serious work on the trilogy of novels, takes place in an unnamed land and at an unnamed time.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, 1783 From The Threepenny Review: The haggard sisters’ brew in Macbeth would have remained a ghastly soup had they not chanted over it, and made “the charm firm and good” with their tripping rhyming curses. Spells can be cast by various means, foul and...

Emma Goldman on drama

So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often succeed in suppressing such manifestations.

Press the Pedal Again

Piper, Eduard Bersudsky, 2013 From Aeon: You press the pedal at the base of Eduard Bersudsky’s sculpture Piper (2013). The shadow on the wall moves, the cogs begin to hum, the little bell rings, and the pair of gendered fauns flex their legs to activate the dog typist at...

Susanna Crossman: Riding the Baking Edge #1

The recipe for this French gâteau au chocolat came scrawled on a damp piece of paper, handed to me, along with a wink, a scowl and a bag of oysters, by Albertine, a sea-captain’s wife...

Just across the street, there was the video game parlor. I call it that because it was not really an arcade, though some of the features were shared: a variety of consoles. It was called ABC studios...

Meaningful Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence

In African Freedom, Phyllis Taoua offers a study of “meaningful freedom” in Africa since independence from the perspective of literary studies...

‘from An Explanation of America: Countries and Explanations’ by Robert Pinsky

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face.

‘Home Thoughts from Aboard Continental Flight 94’ by Daniel Bosch