Results tagged “trojanwar”

READING: Olympia Dukakis, who you know from such films as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, will be at Barnes & Noble tonight. She'll be reading from a brand spakin' new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. She recently put down the Oscar and picked up a pen to write the forward to the antiwar classic.

Movie blogger Jeffrey Wells counts 12 films about America’s entanglements in the Middle East coming down the pipe this year. It’ll be some feat if even one of them matches the urgency, power and electricity of Iphigenia 2.0, Charle’s Mee’s self-described “sampling” of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. You may know the essential storyline: Agamemnon’s army is left stranded en route to the Trojan War when the goddess Artemis stifles the wind to punish him for hunting a sacred deer. Before Artemis will let the army sail on, Agamemnon must make it up to Her by personally slitting his daughter Iphigenia’s throat. It’s an unthinkable act that Agamemnon struggles to avoid, but his soldiers ain't having it. Death is certain for some of them; if the man who sends them to it can’t stomach that sacrifice himself, how dare he demand it of others?

MUSIC: Ever wonder what former Weezer bassist Matt Sharp has been up to? Well, he's back fronting his other old band, The Rentals. With a long list of former members, amongst them Maya Rudolph and Petra Haden, the group is now six-strong, and playing Nokia Theater tonight in support of their new EP, The Last Little Life.

Start sharpening your spurs, gays and gals, because Jake Gyllenhaal is coming to Broadway! If director Mike Nichols has his way, you’ll soon have your chance to stalk the sensitive heartthrob as he flees through the stage door of Farragut North, a new play about presidential campaign hardball penned by a former Howard Dean staffer. According to today’s Post, Gyllenhaal (who made his stage debut in a Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed production of Cats in their parents’ living room) is all-but-confirmed for the cast. But before that, Nichols will shepherd other boldface names to Broadway with a spring revival of Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl, about a washed up wino actor and his beleaguered wife. With Morgan Freeman and our personal favorite Frances McDormand rumored to play the couple, this has Compelling Theatrical Event written all over it.

Maybe it’s just us, but even with spring’s approach an unusual degree of anomie seems to be hanging over everything, slightly twisting and darkening many of the new season’s shows. Not all of them, of course; it is possible to still to see truly lighthearted fare on stage. So do you want to see something that matches the prevailing mood or challenges it? Here are a few options that go both ways:

For a change of pace, this week we bring you a glimpse of the working process of a small New York theater company, a hint at the seams that underlie the shows we normally see from a plush chair in the house of the theater and then review for you. The company in question is LightBox, which is just about five years old now; the show is Ajax: 100% Fun, which opens on Wednesday at the Culture Project. Yesterday, at the invitation of director Ellen Beckerman, we went to a rehearsal at the Trisha Brown dance studios, where – in the absence of set or costumes or footlights – we gained a measure of insight into how the theatre creations we love so much actually come together.