Sunday
24Apr2005
African Simplicity?
04.24.2005 "Too serious isn’t serious at all," Tierno Bokar advises the audience. Nor does it make for very dramatic theater.
Entries by Cassandra Johnson (11)
04.24.2005 Tuesday
29Mar2005
Equal Portions of Black Soup
03.29.2005 
With time and some detachment, it emerges that Karl Marx may have been at once all too human — excessive, rash and self-obsessed — and too detached from life and suffering for his own great plan. It is is this Marx who is evoked in Jonathan Leaf’s The Germans in Paris -- continually on the defense, living in fear, and suffering from a bit of moral Tartuffery to boot.
Friday
18Mar2005
A Glorious Gory Grotesque
03.18.2005 The admixture of pleasure and fear is what entertains; the menace and dread hidden beneath the floorboards of light language and my mother’s saccharine voice as she read to me about big bad wolves dressed up like grandma.
Sunday
13Mar2005
An Intoxicating Hurlyburly
03.13.2005 Walking into the theater to find Ethan Hawke passed out on a couch, his rear exposed, was just the beginning of an evening of great licentious entertainment.
Sunday
06Mar2005
Walls and Other Perils of Democracy
03.6.2005 Democracy's characters are all political men, who must act in front of one another. Perhaps it was no accident that as the performers declared and commented on their lines, I was constantly reminded that I was "at the theatre".
Friday
25Feb2005
Narkissos on the Moon
02.25.2005 The human mentality hasn’t evolved so much since Galileo -- most people still consider themselves the central thing around which all others revolve.
Saturday
12Feb2005
Brutal Beauty -- Richard Foreman's Lunatic Attic
02.12.2005 Gods lingers over the tension between man’s primitive hunger for food and sex and his desire, as Aristotle has it, “to stretch himself out towards knowing.” This tension informs the irony of an experimental artist nostalgic for tradition, putting on a little nightmarish and wishful play, a diaspora of language and images, that longs for simplicity, order, and ritual.
Friday
04Feb2005
Vows Made in Wine -- The Halls' "As You Like it"
02.4.2005 “As You Like It” is a relativist statement, a reply to any number of absolutist queries. How should I love? How should I worship? How should I vote? The answer: As you like it.
Saturday
29Jan2005
Identity Crisis
01.29.2005 Imagine finding out that the people you’ve always known as mom and dad aren’t your biological parents, and that you have a twin you’ve never met. Now try to imagine that you have a clone. Actually, nineteen of them, and you’re in the world of A Number, which takes identity crises to the Nth degree.
Saturday
22Jan2005
Unwound Dolls -- Adapting Three Sisters
01.22.2005 The play began with extreme, indulgent, vulgar, drunken offstage laughter so real and prolonged that it soon spread to the audience, making for one of those great moments when performers and spectators are unexpectedly united.
Saturday
15Jan2005
A Worthwhile Celebration
01.15.2005 A festival dedicated to “Celebrating Women” naturally conjures fears of the cliché and over-earnest performance art about anatomy that bores any honest audience lest it is shown the body parts in question.