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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 11, 2020

Among the O’Connorites

December 11, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Wilma Theater’s webcast of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Here’s an excerpt.

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Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, one of the East Coast’s leading drama companies, has taped a fully staged site-specific production of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” at a private location in the Poconos, turning the cast and crew into a closed quarantine “bubble” so that they could work together face-to-face instead of taping their performances separately via Zoom or green screens. The result, which looks more like a small-scale movie than an online webcast of a stage show, is a flawless, impressively well-cast production of a work of singular distinction, one for which the word “remarkable” is, if anything, an understatement.

The play, directed by Blanka Zizka, is set in rural Wyoming in 2017. It centers on Emily (Campbell O’Hare), Kevin (Justin Jain) and Teresa (Sarah Gliko), who are in their mid-to-late 20s and are meeting at the off-the-grid shack of Justin (Jered McLenigan), a somewhat older but like-minded man. The young people are all in the familiar process of discovering themselves, but there is nothing else ordinary about them: They are conservative Catholic intellectuals-in-the-making who have been girding themselves for battle in the coming culture wars….

While I feel sure that many of those who saw “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” in New York found the characters, not entirely without reason, to be potentially dangerous extremists, they are far more complicated and interesting than that, for life in urban America has nibbled away at their orthodoxies….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the Wilma Theater’s webcast of Heroes of the Fourth Turning: 

Replay: Humphrey Bogart accepts an Oscar for The African Queen

December 11, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Greer Garson presents the 1952 Best Actor Oscar to Humphrey Bogart for his performance in John Huston’s The African Queen. It was Bogart’s first Oscar:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Tom Stoppard on God

December 11, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“I don’t claim to know that God exists. I only claim that he does without my knowing it.”

Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

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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