![]() ![]() Second, talk about an embarrassment of riches: Here’s a second Assassins reunion (you can find info on the first, still streaming for free, at Volume 40), in which Classic Stage Company is bringing together members of the original 1990 cast, the Tony-winning 2004 revival, and its own upcoming production (originally scheduled to open last April). You can reach me through Forward at or directly at As always, both “theater” and “Fischer” are spelled with an er.įirst, here’s the trailer for Shadow/Land, first play in a projected ten-play epic by Erika Dickerson-Despenza (2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner) about Hurricane Katrina, its aftermath, and the consequent diaspora from New Orleans it began airing yesterday as an audio play (free, although registration is required) courtesy of Public Theater: WATCH What play or playwright has done most to change how you see yourself and the world? I’d love to know. Such transition and transformation is what the best theater invariably delivers – helping us to become better, by challenging us to be human. Some of these selections suggest that we can overcome such limiting ideas of how things “must” be, learning instead to explore a more expansive world of multiple, infinitely textured selves. Some of these selections end in tragedy – akin to what happened to Hemingway, whose great gifts were eroded by his narrow view of what it means to be a man. In short, great art deconstructs the damaging definitions in which we imprison ourselves, dying a little death each day because we can’t muster the courage to live what we intuitively know – emphatically including the fact that gender is a spectrum, and that every one of us is simultaneously both and neither “man” and/or “woman.”Įach of this week’s picks explores what happens when imposed ideas of who we should be and what we must do thwart our efforts to see the world, its peoples, and ourselves as they actually are and might yet become. Our need to label and judge, condemn and conform. Nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism. That’s how great art works: it helps us see when we don’t know how to look, liberating us from the blinding, socially constructed shackles of race, class, and gender. His toxic masculinity never evaporates, but it’s not all that’s there.”Įspecially in the short stories and novels like A Farewell to Arms, one sees this more flexible and open-ended Hemingway: the (wo)man behind the he-man myth – or, as Hilton Als wrote in his characteristically insightful review of the Burns/Novick film, the Hemingway who longed to be a girl in love with a powerful woman (Als has long been one of our best thinkers on mythologies of race and gender I’ll have more to say about his most recent project, for New York Theatre Workshop, when the second of its two parts is released). “For all his bravado,” Burns noted in a recent interview, “there is also a curiosity, sympathy, and even a gender and sexual fluidity to him. As Ken Burns and Lynn Novick make clear in their recently released Hemingway, an androgynous Ernest Hemingway wrestled with his self-fashioned, inherently destructive cult of machismo all his life. In his unfinished novel The Garden of Eden, the most defiantly masculine of our great writers created a male protagonist who wanted to be a woman. VOLUME 44 (APRIL 14, 2021): THE PRICE WE PAY FOR THE ROLES WE PLAY ![]() VOLUME 20 | VOLUME 21 | VOLUME 22 | VOLUME 23 | VOLUME 24 | VOLUME 25 | VOLUME 26 | VOLUME 27 | VOLUME 26 | VOLUME 28 | VOLUME 29 | VOLUME 30 | VOLUME 31 | VOLUME 32 | VOLUME 33 | VOLUME 34 | VOLUME 35 | VOLUME 36 | VOLUME 37 | VOLUME 38 | VOLUME 39 | VOLUME 38 | VOLUME 40 | VOLUME 41 | VOLUME 42 | VOLUME 43 We hope you'll enjoy his recommendations for the best arts-in-quarantine content. 44 Curated by Advisory Company member Mike FischerĪdvisory Company member Mike Fischer is a dramaturg and former theater critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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