Theatre Archives - Public Seminar

Past Present

Larry Kramer, Playwright and AIDS Activist

Past Present Podcast, Episode 233

June 16, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Pioneering AIDS activist Larry Kramer died this month. Natalia referred to this Vulture interview about Kramer’s legacy. Neil commented on Kramer’s autobiographical play, The Normal Heart. In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History: Natalia recommended the Netflix documentary, Crip Camp: A ...

Film & Performing Arts

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

March 2, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

New York City

Love and Death on the Streets of New York

Why West Side Story is back

February 3, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

But that may be about to change. A radically new production of West Side Story will open on Broadway next month. And a new West Side Story movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and using locations in Harlem and Paterson, NJ, is to come to the screen later this year. Urban ...

Love and Death on the Streets of New York

Race

The Outcast State

Shakespeare’s Unlikely Connection to Black Subjectivity

June 18, 2019 • by Seven Richmond

Now that race is the hottest topic of discussion, Othello is everywhere, positioned as the Shakespeare on race. This past semester, while we were reading the play, there were no fewer than four different Othello adaptations nearby: Bill Rauch’s production at the American Reparatory Theater, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol’s Othello in the Seraglio, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and a ...

Race

Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Imani Perry’s ‘Looking for Lorraine’ Review

April 5, 2019 • by Robert Greene II

The play A Raisin in the Sun is one of the most recognizable stage productions in the last 60 years of American history. Many Americans have encountered it -- whether on Broadway, at a local production, in film, or in a high school or college classroom. Yet, the person who wrote it, ...

Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Feature

Iconoclasm Today

Overturning the icons of toxic masculinity

October 19, 2018 • by John Hudson

What difference would it make if Shakespeare’s work was written by a dark-skinned woman, a feminist courtesan-poet, from a family of second generation Jewish-Italian immigrants? When my book on Shakespeare came out in 2014, I was happy to get a supportive reception from Dr. Gina Luria Walker, professor of women's studies at the ...

Feature

Protesting Shakespeare in Central Park

Reflections on the Meaning of Anti-theatrical Controversy

July 10, 2017 • by Lisa A. Freeman

Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, one that featured a Donald Trump lookalike. The assassination of Caesar, a key moral turning point in the play, prompted repeated right-wing protests until the production closed on June 19. ...

Feature

Revisiting the Scourge of Human Folly

A Review of Charles Ludlam’s ‘The Artificial Jungle’

June 22, 2017 • by Dara Levendosky

“A theme that threatens to destroy one’s whole value system. Treat the material in a madly farcical manner without losing the seriousness of the theme. Show how paradoxes arrest the mind. Scare yourself a bit along the way.” – Charles Ludlam During the 1960s, New York City experienced a surge in ...

Feature

Trump as Ubu Roi

On the charismatic appeal of vulgarity

June 6, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Many are the analogies for the current President of the United States. Such analogies always contain within them theoretical debates about the nature of Trump’s appeal, the prospects for his rule, and how the coterie around him will conduct themselves in relation to Trump, in relation to each other, and ...