Results tagged “nathanielhawthorne”

MUSIC: Merkin Concert Hall is reopening, and to help celebrate some of the piano greats will be on hand for a free, six hour concert. Philip Glass and John Medeski will be amongst those who will perform. Get more details here.

THEATER: Len Jenkin's Kraken imagines the details of an actual 1856 encounter between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville, his Moby-Dick long since met with a critical “meh”, was in the midst of a spiritual journey to Jerusalem – a trip that would, two decades later, yield the back-breaking, 2 Volume, 18,000 line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. En route he stopped to visit his old Berkshire homey Hawthorne, now the American consul in Liverpool. In Jenkin’s dramatization, the two literary legends – neither one legendary in their day – spend the evening together confronting their “fears, failures, things of this world and the next”, etc. According to Hawthorne’s diary, ol’ Hermy may have droned on a bit: “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief.” Garrett Eisler, who reviewed Kraken for the Voice, writes that the voyage does “dock at a satisfying port.” - John Del Signore

On Sundays, Gothamist publishes opinion pieces relevant to life in New York City. The opinions expressed in the book review below belong to Dio, a very well-read 23-year old, and not to Gothamist-- which should be obvious, since we only read magazines.

This year more than any we remember from recent past, theater companies are gearing up to bring you Halloween-related shows. It’s appropriate, when you think about it – actors are all about dressing up as people/things other than themselves, so they should lead the way when the rest of the world decides to masquerade. In any case, options abound citywide. Psycho Clan, for instance, has an interactive haunted house program called Nightmare going, which looks pretty freaky just from the website. The 13 rooms are supposed to be “more David Lynch than John Carpenter” and it’s already selling out.