• Home
  • About
    • Straight Up
    • Jan Herman
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Straight Up | Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

You are here: Home / Archives for Theater

Lear Lite

October 26, 2020 by Jan Herman

Shakespeare’s writing—all of it, poetry and plays—was repulsive to Tolstoy, who claimed that whenever he read Shakespeare he was overcome by “repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment.” As for “King Lear,” ranked among Shakespeare’s four greatest tragedies, he found it “at every step,” according to George Orwell, “stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, ‘wild ravings,’ ‘mirthless jokes,’ anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.”

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

David Erdos in His One-Man Show About Lenny Bruce

December 7, 2019 by Jan Herman

At the Cockpit Theatre in London: ‘His Last Cabaret’

Plus his poem, ‘When a Tower Falls,’ which carries on Heathcote Williams’s legacy, but in Erdos’s own key: When a society falls, what you notice first is the rubble, / Seen on TV, ghosted buildings give way to dust / Through bomb blast. Through the sudden heat and the haze, / You will see only the print of lost towers, fading with age: / Time’s fragmented, and your first tasted moments / Clash and mix badly with the afterburn and the bitter / Of what could well be your last. Of course, the world has seen / Towers fall through man made event, false god sanctioned, / But we seem to have made no true effort to rebuild or renew / What was lost. What we lack has been leased and sold again / To new builders who continue to falsify all around us / While tapping us still for the cost. …

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Out of the Fax Machine and Into the Past

November 16, 2019 by Jan Herman

So I was looking over some documents I had stored away years ago. (When you get old you start looking back, as everybody knows who has ever got old.) Well, I came across this fax from my great old friend, the late Carl Weissner. At first I couldn’t place what he meant by “O’s diary.” But then I realized that “O” was a reference to Orton, the playwright Joe Orton, whose plays I deeply admired and occasionally reviewed, and that I had sent Carl one of them, which is what set him off. As to the Raymond Chandler quotation Carl was thinking of using as a motto for a collection of magazine pieces, it turned out that he used it for his doomsday-lit novel “Death in Paris” instead, which he wrote online and which was published posthumously in paperback and as an ebook. Dear Carl, you are missed.

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Mirren and McKellen . . . This Time for Laughs?

November 5, 2019 by Jan Herman

I see from the morning paper that Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen were on Broadway as surprise guests in an improv hip-hop comedy and that Mirren is quoted as saying, “We are so outside of our comfort zones.” Rodney Dangerfield couldn’t have said it better. The only other time they were on a Broadway stage together was in a Strindberg’s “Dance of Death”—let me take you back.

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Fluxus, Intermedia and . . .

September 26, 2019 by Jan Herman

The Something Else Factor: Alison Knowles, Barbara Moore, Martha Wilson and I will be participating this evening in a panel about the glory days of Something Else Press, moderated by Hannah B. Higgins, at the Emily Harvey Foundation. It’s the first of four discussions organized by Christian Xatrec and Alice Centamore. The events are free. RSVP to ehf.nework@gmail.com

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

A Gothic Tale Set in Black and White

September 10, 2019 by Jan Herman

Other works by Ligia Lewis include Sensation 1/This Interior (High Line Commission) (2019); so something happened, get over it; no, nothing happened, get with it (Jaou Tunis) (2018); Melancholy: A White Mellow Drama (Flax Fahrenheit, Palais de Tokyo) (2015); minor matter (2016), a poetic piece illuminated by red; Sorrow Swag (2014), presented in a saturated blue; $$$ (Tanz im August) (2012); and Sensation 1 (sommer.bar, Tanz im August -2011, Basel Liste- 2014).

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Encore: A Little ‘Newspaper Music’

July 23, 2019 by Jan Herman

This reading of a Fluxus piece by Alison Knowles from 1962 was recorded probably in 1967. The cassette tape was salvaged from a recent basement flood and digitized by the indefatiguable S|U staff. Ear plugs may be helpful in some passages.

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Power Malu Shines at 2019 Ackers

March 27, 2019 by Jan Herman

The honorees at the 2019 NY Acker Awards made some terrific statements about the history of the Lower East Side and their commitment both to the community and to the arts, but a rap performance by Power Malu about the devastation in Puerto Rico, where people are still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and from the Trumpistan government’s failure to provide proper help, was the most notable of the evening.

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

2019 NY Acker Awards Held at Theater for the New City

March 20, 2019 by Jan Herman

Poster by Steve Ellis, Fly O.

The Acker Awards, now in their sixth year, are a tribute given to members of the avant-garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways. The award’s novelist namesake, in her life and work, exemplified the risk-taking and […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Beckett’s ‘Rockaby’ Set by William Osborne

February 19, 2019 by Jan Herman

In William Osborne’s setting of ‘Rockaby’ we hear the whispered thoughts of an old woman during the last twenty-five minutes of her life accompanied by the dirge of four distant trombones. “Those arms at last…”

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’

December 27, 2018 by Jan Herman

Abbie Conant as Miriam in 'The Chair, Part 2' (music by William Osborne)

“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown.  Institutionalized, she  attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but  can find no words to express her feelings.  She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence.  Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

‘So Much Sour Salami’

August 4, 2018 by Jan Herman

Sour Salami hat

Frank Scully, a long-forgotten journalist, was recalling the first time he met Luigi Pirandello in Paris in the cocktail lounge of a movie theater on the Champs Elysée. It was well before World War II, but he could have been writing about the here and now in Trumpistan. Pirandello was “on the lam from his […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

‘Meeting Jim’ (Who’s Having the Time of His Life)

May 28, 2018 by Jan Herman

Jim Haynes at home.

I’ve never met Jim. We’ve only corresponded by email about the strange case of Orwell’s typewriter. But I know that Jim Haynes is a man for all reasons — pleasure, food, sex, mind, books, theater, life — and that to meet him in person all you have to do is show up at his door […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

‘Aletheia’ to Tour Northeastern U.S.

February 12, 2018 by Jan Herman

'Aletheia,' a chamber music theater work performed by Abbie Conant, with a score by William Osborne.

Composed by William Osborne for singer-instrumentalist, computer-controlled piano, and quadraphonic electronics, “Aletheia” is a music theater work featuring the solo performance of Abbie Conant as the title character. Osborne writes, “Aletheia is an opera singer who is delighted that she has been asked to perform for an opera gala. She only needs to go down […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

Acker Awards to Honor One-of-a Kind Artists

January 18, 2018 by Jan Herman

Acker Awards [image by Rolano Vega] Theater 80 80 St. Marks Place, NY (Jan. 21 6 p.m.)

I don’t know what the late Kathy Acker would think of an award given in her name to non-conforming artists. I assume an experimental punk novelist and poet would like the idea of supporting artists who don’t conform. Although awards are besides the point especially for non-conformists, they do generate publicity. And unless I’m wrong, […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

‘Just Like Real Life’

October 14, 2017 by Jan Herman

William Cody Maher & Signe Mähler at Freehome / Berlin (Oct. 21-28)

William Cody Maher & Signe Mähler “two people who have been living together for a long time have learned how to live together with the objects and the thoughts and the feelings that they have had for each other and when the thoughts and feelings and the rooms and the objects change and even the […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit

‘After the Revolution’: Heathcote Williams as Playwright

July 25, 2017 by Jan Herman

Jay Jeff Jones

Jay Jeff Jones writes in London’s Theatre Record: Like [Jeff] Nuttall, Williams was multi-talented and constant in his espousal of utopian anarchy. He was as uncompromising as he was compassionate; an intellectual force that alternated poetry and playwriting with direct action for causes that included the homeless, battered women and the environment. His first major […]

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit
Next Page »

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

About

Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

Books ‘n’ Stuff

My biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, is available as an ebook at Amazon and an ebook on iTunes at the Apple … [Read More...]

Contact me

We're cutting down on spam. Please fill in this form. … [Read More...]

Archives

Blogroll

Abstract City
AC Institute
ACKER AWARDS New York
All Things Allen Ginsberg
AmericaBlog
American Leftist
Antiwar.com
ArkivMusic.com
Arts & Letters Daily

Bellaart
Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal

C-SPAN
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News
Cost of War
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Weekly

The Daily Howler
David E’s Fablog
Dark Roasted Blend
DCReport
Democracy Now!
Devil Ducky

Ehrensteinland
Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Flixnosh (David Elliott’s movie menu)
Fluxlist Europe

Good Reads
The Guardian (London)
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
The Intercept
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland
IT: International Times, The Magazine of Resistance

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Henry Kisor
Paul Krugman

Lannan Foundation
Life During Wartime
Los Angeles Times

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Moloko Print
Movie Geeks United (MGU)
MGU: The Kubrick Series

Nat. Arts Journalism Program
National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Open City
Osborne & Conant

The Overgrown Path

Political Irony
Poynter

The Quarterly Conversation

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
The Reeler
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Seeing Black
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Studs Terkel
The Synergic Theater

TalkLeft
The 3rd Page
ThugLit: Writing About Wrongs
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web

Vox

The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia
The Washington Post
James Wolcott
World Catalogue
World Newspapers, Magazines & News Sites

The XD Agency

Email this to someone
email
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit
This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in