From 2004:
I can’t count the hours I spent haunting big-city libraries as a young man. During the decade I spent working on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken I had access to the closed stacks of the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and I checked out books by the bagful.
Alas, I no longer go to Baltimore each week, nor do I have access to the stacks of a university library, and the branch of the New York Public Library located in my neighborhood is roughly the size of the one in Smalltown, U.S.A., on which I cut my teeth forty years ago. When I need information, I now look first to the Web, then to my personal library, which is small but choice. Should those alternatives fail to satisfy me, I walk two blocks to a very large Barnes & Noble and explore its shelves. If that doesn’t do it, I do without, or order a used copy of the book in question from amazon.com.
I wonder how common my experience is….
Read the whole thing here.
Farce is the most paradoxical of all genres of comedy. It requires high discipline on the part of the director, the actors and their offstage collaborators to set in motion the whirligig of seeming onstage chaos that is farce at its best. Without split-second control, everything falls apart—and not in a good way, either. Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw,” a four-door farce of transcendent indelicacy, is as funny a play as has ever been written, but it won’t play itself: It must be staged to the hilt, unobtrusively but decisively and in precise accordance with Orton’s explicit requirement that the actors behave as though they have no idea that their plight is preposterous. “Unless it’s real,” he wrote, “it won’t be funny.” Paul Mullins’ unusually well-cast Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey production obeys that commandment, as well as all of Orton’s stage directions, with madly funny consequences….
In a small house like the 308-seat F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, farces can be produced with an up-close economy of dramatic gesture that suits Orton’s work quite well. In a large outdoor amphitheater like American Players Theatre’s 1,088-seat Up-the-Hill Theatre, where Georges Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear” is currently being mounted, bigger and broader comic techniques are needed to engage the audience. David Frank’s APT revival of Feydeau’s 1907 masterpiece about hijinks at what Mr. Frank’s brand-new English-language adaptation dubs the Mount Venus Hotel (Feydeau called it the Hotel Coq d’Or) is nominally set in turn-of-the-century Paris. In practice, it feels more like a jumbo version of the kind of all-American sketch comedy in which Sid Caesar and Carol Burnett used to specialize—and I mean that as a compliment. The doors start slamming with abandon in the second act, and by play’s end you’ll be sore from rib-stretching laughter….
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