Hercules at the bat
A Bat Wants to be Swung. Grip its handle with both hands, hold it out in front of you, and feel the tug of its top-heaviness. Lift it up, and
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“Strange Apparent Cruelty”
Novelist Jonathan Franzen told Time Magazine why he does not write about race: ““If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person – a person
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“Mingling with the Mists of Heaven”
At Newark airport boarding my flight back to Chicago, I studied an old copy of Arthur Waley’s The No Plays of Japan (Grove Press, 1957, priced at $1.95). I was
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“Is not this strange?”
“Pericles” (now at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience” directed by Trevor Nunn (http://www.tfana.org/season-2016/pericles/overview) and starring Christian Camargo) is full of incident. It is an exotic tale of riddles, incest,
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“Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things”
Shakespeare’s comedies are social experiments. His wild plots submit characters to the trial of whatever can happen. So he strips selves from their social identities and reveals both psyche and
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“Something rich and strange”
Having resolved this year, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, to experience in any way, shape, or form the bard’s entire oeuvre, my first was Shakespeare’s reputed last, “The Tempest.”
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“World, world, O world!/… thy strange mutations make us hate thee”
The Belarus Free Theatre’s “King Lear” (https://www.chicagoshakes.com/plays_and_events/belarus_lear) can be hard to watch. Performed in Belarusian, you have to continually shift your eyes from reading the supertitles above the stage to watching
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