Results tagged “unclevanya”

Park Slopers Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, dubbed New York’s hippest stay-at-home parents by the Times, have joined the cast of Classic Stage Company's Uncle Vanya, to be directed by Austin Pendleton for a January opening. It's the second Chekhov play in a row for Sarsgaard, who's currently on Broadway in an excellent production of The Seagull, and the first time the couple have worked together, aside from a short film. In other stage news, Liza Minelli canceled last night's performance of her new one-woman Broadway show because she was "suffering from dehydration." Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty will come to Broadway after all, but it's unclear whether Alison Pill will reprise her much buzzed-about role. And one performance of Will Ferrell's hotly anticipated Broadway show, You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush, will be simulcast on HBO.

In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Brooklyn-based writer Benjamin Nugent combines a peripatetic history of the word “nerd” with accounts of the various kinds of people it is most often used to describe. The book includes an autobiographical dose; one section called “My Credentials” details Nugent’s early 90s adolescent exodus from d20-style probabilities. On page 3, Nugent fittingly discloses: “when I was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.” But American Nerd isn’t a massive, single subject history, and it isn’t straightforward memoir. The book is often poignant, especially when Nugent revisits the proving grounds of his young nerd-hood, and more often than that it is funny. The nerd you recognize in its pages may very well be yourself.