Results tagged “georgesaunders”

The Brooklyn Academy of Music kicked off their fourth season of Eat Drink & Be Literary last night at the BAMcafé. The sold-out event revolved around author George Saunders, a craftsman of absurdly hilarious short story and essays that lovingly lift American consumerism and mass media to surreal heights. His laugh-out-loud short story Pastoralia, for instance, concerns a man and a woman portraying full-time troglodytes in a theme park exhibit. In 2006, Saunders, who has a degree in geophysical engineering, was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant for “bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all his own.”

Todd Zuniga, Opium Magazine

Since we haven’t been following the New York theatre scene for years and years, we’d rather not pontificate about how 2005 was overall for the art. Thinking about it now, it seems like it was pretty great, but that might just be our affectionate, soft-focus hindsight, plus we’re just crazy about theatre in general. And even though we see way more of it than most people we know, nytheatre.com’s season archives quickly reminded us that we made it to a mere fraction of what was on offer, so there’s no pretending we saw “the” best performance. But of what we did go to, here’s what stands out as the year finishes (in no real order except for saving the best for last).

Gothamist is always happy to see George Saunders’ name in the table of contents when we pick up the New Yorker or Harpers, so we were definitely keen to see Yehuda Duenyas’ stage adaptation of the short story Pastoralia, playing now at PS 122. We weren’t disappointed. The actors bring Saunders’ partly hilarious, partly sorrowful fable to life to an extent you might not think possible just by reading the story; and while it might be off-off-Broadway, where certain elements of a production are sometimes necessarily neglected for lack of space or money, everything about this show, beginning with the fantastic set by Michael Casselli, work to draw you into the world Saunders created in his distinctive style, which Duenyas translates faithfully to stage.