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March 16, 2007
TT: Lives of noisy desperation
I review two new revivals in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio and August Wilson's King Hedley II:Twenty years ago, Eric Bogosian was one of the hottest young guns in American theater, a performance artist whose blisteringly intense one-man shows were must-see events. Now he’s a regular on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” Was he really as good as he seemed back in the days when “Drinking in America” and “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” were the talk of the town? Second Stage’s wan revival of “subUrbia,” Mr. Bogosian’s 1994 play about life among the slackers, heightened my retrospective suspicion that he was more a magnetic performer than a convincing writer, and so I’ve been anxiously awaiting the Broadway revival of “Talk Radio,” whose original Public Theater production remains one of my most vivid theatergoing memories. Now that I’ve seen it, I can report that “Talk Radio” makes the same impression today that it did in 1987—which isn’t entirely good news....
August Wilson was a major playwright who went off the rails somewhere in between “Fences,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and “Gem of the Ocean,” his next-to-last play, whose 2005 Broadway premiere was a high-minded snoozefest. Now that I’ve seen the Signature Theatre Company’s revival of “King Hedley II,” written in 2001, I understand more clearly what went wrong with Wilson’s “Pittsburgh cycle” of plays about the black experience in 20th-century America: He stopped showing and started telling....
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Posted March 16, 2007 12:00 PM
