Commentaries

Snelson on Eclipse, Clay on Granary, Freeman on Drucker, ed Kyle Schlesinger, new ABR

bernstec — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:47:00 +0000

American Book Review
Volume 34, Number 3
March/April 2012
a feature on bringing out-of-print materials back into view, including essays by Penn's own Danny Snelson on Craig Dworkin's Eclipse -- now on-line at
http://eclipsearchive.org/ Here is a pdf of Snelson's full article.">http://eclipsearchive.org/

Douglas Messerli on Richard Foreman's new play Old Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)

bernstec — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:47:06 +0000

The Unfortunate Truth of My Situation

Richard Foreman Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)

The Public Theater, New York, the performance I attended was on Saturday, May 4, 2013.

After years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). Like most of his works, this play is set upon a stage decked out with numerous alphabetical configurations, portraits of “significant” people, numerous odd props, and the strings that outline the horizontal shell of the stage, a kind of mix between a metaphorical representation of string theory and an eruv, the defining territory of the traditional Jewish community that outlines the boundaries through which certain objects can be moved or carried on holy days. The effect, no matter what Foreman’s precise purposes, is to draw a line between what occurs on “stage” and the audience. Above all else, Foreman’s plays are definitely not narrative representations that draw their audiences into the “romance” of the story, but are purposefully puzzling brain twisters that demand the audience think about what is being said and done within the author’s domain.

Recalculating

bernstec — Sun, 12 May 2013 01:09:50 +0000

cover image by Susan Bee, photo by Alan Thomas

University of Chicago Press
208 pages: cloth $25.00 | E-book $7.00 to $18.00
available now: order from any independent book seller
or from Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C.
10% off all orders: Email rod@bridgestreetbooks.com & Bridge Street will invoice you.