You know the story: A young woman, a bit too obsessed with who’s cool and who’s not, sets out to make the world a better place by fixing up her friends with the perfect boyfriends and girlfriends. She gets it all wrong. Feelings are hurt. She’s especially mistaken in regards to who she belongs with…
It is generally accepted that William Shakespeare—aka the Immortal Bard, aka the Upstart Crow, aka the Sweet Swan of Avon, aka the greatest playwright the world has ever known—wrote 37 plays during his lifetime, which ended exactly 400 years ago last April 23. He possibly wrote more. Possibly a lot more. Possibly even a play…
“William Butler Yeats was an astonishingly complex individual,” says harpist and storyteller Patrick Ball, describing the legendary Irish poet and playwright — and sometime politician and mystic philosopher — whose mysterious, atmospheric poetry has solidly placed its creator within the ranks of the greatest literary figures of the 20th Century. “He was brilliant of course,…
For years now, a number of notable cable television stations and movie revival houses have marked St. Patrick’s Day by playing the John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara classic “The Quiet Man,” among other shamrock-flavored films. It makes sense. The 65-year-old film does still hold up, dramatically – for its charming small town setting and magnificent fist-fight-brawl at…
“Slavery is a horror story,” says San Francisco playwright Star Finch. “Slavery is something that, when you are African-American, and also a parent, you have to tell your children about at some point. And that’s horrifying. That’s a very painful thing. It’s painful in general, telling your children about the horrors of the world.…
There’s a line that comes about halfway through Edward Albee’s classic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Unlike so much of the rest of Albee’s brutal and brilliant drama, it’s not a line full of anger or recrimination, or witty humor, or caustic observation. As such, it stands out like a whisper in a rainstorm.…
Among William Shakespeare’s many lofty histories – for hundreds of years the Bard’s best attended plays (till the 1800s came and his tragedies took their place in theatergoers’ hearts) – Henry IV, parts one and two have lost much of the love Elizabethans felt for them. If they are performed today at all, it is…
