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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Almanac

December 10, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried out by magic: to victimize
an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and miss their
trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived,
drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is
also a court against which there is no appeal. Art’s relation with its
client is here at its closest and most immediate. In other arts, we can
blame the client: he is stupid, unsophisticated, inattentive, dull. But
the theatre must, if need be, stoop–and stoop–until it attains the
direct, the universal communication which other artists can afford to
seek more deviously and at their ease.”


Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (courtesy of Mindy Alter)

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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