Imagine the challenge for Romain Duris! He has to follow a great piece of acting (Fabrice Luchini brilliantly pretending to be a bad actor and offering a horse, or horseness, that is itself a delight). Duris’s challenge is to surpass this. In a sense he fails, or could not succeed, because a great actor playing a bad actor will always trump a great actor simply playing a great actor.
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: acting, Molière, movies, Shakespeare, theater
George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, which premiered in London in 1905, is shining once again in an excellent production at New York’s Pearl Theatre. The dominant personality, of a play that offers half a dozen or more strong characters, is Andrew Undershaft, an enormously successful weapons manufacturer—for anyone and everyone, without prejudice, throughout the world. As Undershaft himself puts it: To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, George Bernard Shaw, government, Major Barbara, theater, war
Johannes Vermeer died in 1675. In the 1860s, when the French writer Théophile Thoré began publishing essays about Vermeer’s work— few connoisseurs outside Holland had heard of the artist’s name. Indeed, even in Holland it was possible, during that period, for great works by Vermeer to go completely unrecognized: in 1881, the collector A.A. des Tombe purchased perhaps Vermeer’s most iconic painting, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, for all of 2½ guilders at a small auction in The Hague. The quotation is […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, Donald Judd, Jenny Holzer, Lisbon, theater, Vermeer
The Atlantic Theater Company in New York is currently presenting a new musical, Found, based on “on scores of surprising and eccentric discarded notes and letters that have been ‘found’ in the real world by every-day people.” I do not know why the Web announcement puts “found” in quotes, and I am wary of musicals, but the very idea of this piece has caused me re-open one of my several files of found language. In this case these are […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: family, friendship, jobs, marriage, theater
We lost Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) last week, at least in body. Writer, poet, dramatist, and civil rights activist, Baraka was slight in stature but grand in presence, words, and ability to generate controversy. He inhabited multiple spaces—in the form of books such as Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) which he wrote when he still called himself LeRoi Jones, never out of print; in politics as he protested unequal treatment of African Americans; in poetry in his association with Ginsberg, […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: African-Americans, Civil Rights Movement, poet, theater
A Week of Reading from . . . William Eaton, Zeteo Executive Editor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading. Click for pdf of text of this entire week.] 27 October 2013: Brecht When this feature, one of my favorite parts of Zeteo, was getting under way, I suggested to my colleagues: Imagine you were strolling down Fifth Avenue or through Central Park and were taking pictures of people and scenes that caught your […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: Baudelaire, Brecht, ethics, Flaubert, Halloween, Jesus, Machiavelli, parenting, poetry, terror, theater
That Troublesome Jew Shylock and the Corruption of “The Merchant of Venice” By Aaron Botwick In 1947, the actor and playwright Maurice Schwartz rather audaciously rewrote The Merchant of Venice. The result, Shylock and His Daughter, is a radically philosemitic text, one that throws out most of Shakespeare’s play and replaces it with a kind, Jewish moneylender surrounded by antisemitic, unforgiving Christians.[1] Comic villain had become comic hero. But only five years after 1942—a date that, like 70 CE […]
Categories: Article, Spring 2013 Issue • Tags: anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Shakespeare, theater
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