Seph Mozes is a Chicago-based dramaturg and director whose evening of Gertrude Stein's plays, TURKEY AND BONES AND EATING AND WE LIKED IT, will be presented at Facility Theatre in Humboldt Park from March 14th to 29th. I sat down with him to discuss the unique challenges of
As the American theatre approaches the tenth anniversary of the death of writer Sam Shepard, who died in 2017, productions of his plays have become grounds of investigation and not just commemoration. When an artist dies, their work is upheld as a beacon of some sort of truth about the
Who needs the Oscars? Even with Conan O’Brien hosting, they’ll be disappointing, overlong, and, this year at least, likely transphobic and weird. So, as a cycle of new films comes to a close (like Rosh Hashanah for movies), let’s take some time to celebrate some of the
In presenting the classics, directors and producers tend to foreground an aesthetic twist in their production. Dramaturg extraordinaire Anne Cattaneo, in the chapter “Deepen an Interpretation” in her book The Art of Dramaturgy, uses “Coriolanus as Stalin” as a shorthand for this inclination. Maybe this happens due to anxiety about
For the return of lauded Chicago theatre company Lookingglass, an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote feels like an auspicious choice of material. Lookingglass’ brand of equally intimate and epic theatre asks its audience to lean in and absorb the fact that they are sharing space with top-flight artists.
Brady Corbet’s postwar epic The Brutalist follows László Toth, a Jewish architect seeking refuge in post-war America, as he embarks on a building project for a mysterious Philadelphia benefactor and is reunited with his wife and niece. It’s a sensory-overload period piece, shot on the once-defunct Vistavision format,
Hello and welcome to Simpler and With More Laughter! You're likely seeing this because you previously followed me on Substack. For a variety of reasons, I have migrated my writing from Substack to Ghost, the service you are reading on now. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has elucidated many of
A breath of fresh, sawdust-laden air.
Not a list, but also a list.
Punk Who? American What?
On snobbery and earnestness
Ngozi Anyanwu's Leroy and Lucy at Steppenwolf Theatre Company