Delirious at the Met Breuer is an exhibition filled with beautiful but comparatively polite works by habitually transgressive artists.
Samuel Beckett
Posted inPerformance
Confronting Our Apathy Anew with Samuel Beckett
On paper, Happy Days looks pretty unappealing.
Posted inPoetry
Dread States: Samuel Beckett’s Poems
Confronting the new volume of The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett of nearly 500 pages in length, one might be tempted to proclaim — as many have of Beckett’s mentor, James Joyce — that his best poetry appeared in his fiction and, in Beckett’s case alone, in his dramatic works.
Posted inBooks
Some Sentences to Relax With
As I sometimes — or quite a lot of the time — find myself disposed to avoid the demands of work and household, my favorite dodge is perusing much read books for those “juicy” parts that I’ve doted over for years. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy is just the right book for this kind of time wasting: It’s a novel about an indolent, hapless, emotionally paralyzed man. He’s a loner, out of step with the world, torn between desire for his mistress and the wish to sink further in a self-involved fantasy world. The eponymous un-hero Murphy (he really can’t be called an anti-hero as his chief aspiration — a catatonic state achieved by rocking in his rocking chair — barely qualifies as anti-anything) is securely held by what Blake called “mind forg’d manacles.”
Posted inPerformance
Art of Video Games: “Theater of the Arcade: 5 Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage”
Video games appear to be making oddly pervasive cameos across fields as varied as architecture, art, cinema, criticism, and now theater. Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage is exactly that, a series of five plays that Jeff Lewonczyk wrote and Gyda Arber directed at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg through July 25.
The premise of Theater of the Arcade is to take the characters from an iconic video game — let’s say “Frogger” — and insert those characters into a world that operates according to the logic and stage vernacular of an equally iconic 20th century dramatist — let’s say Samuel Beckett à la Godot …