Oct 1, 2019
Are Broadway musicals feminist? It’s a fair question, given that many classic examples of the genre evince their fair share of outdated attitudes regarding gender and the role of women in society. However, as Dr. Stacy Wolf of Princeton University points out, there’s a surprising undercurrent of feminism even in the...
Oct 1, 2019
The characters and events of ancient Greek drama might seem remote from our present-day concerns, but Bryan Doerries and Theater of War Productions don’t see it that way. Since 2009, this company has used readings from classical theatre to tackle issues from post-traumatic stress disorder to the community impact of...
Oct 1, 2019
John Marston was a controversial early modern English playwright and poet with a nose for trouble, but he’s relatively obscure in comparison with some of his major contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Now a team of scholars is preparing The Complete Works of John Marston, which will collect his...
Oct 1, 2019
The phrase “morality play” often comes off as pejorative today; it’s a phrase that we use when we want to dismiss something as dull and didactic. But Dr. Matthew Sergi of the University of Toronto begs to differ. He’s been studying and, most importantly, staging these works, and he’s come to some unexpected...
Oct 1, 2019
Most of us know Oscar Wilde for his sparkling, witty comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. But he also wrote tragedies, most notably the scandalous Salomé. He’d intended the play, which dramatizes the biblical episode in which the title character causes the death of John the Baptist, as a star vehicle for the great...