In light of current events, I’m dropping the bleak Waiting for Godot from my World Drama class (actually I’m making it optional; students could drop a different play) and adding Thornton Wilder’s absurdist but optimistic The Skin of Our Teeth. Writing while World War II was still raging, Wilder depicts a representative American family…
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Cherry, the upper-class go-between spanning the worlds of the greasers and the Socs, is played by Carolyn Jerz, last seen at the New Hazlett as the leading lady/gentleman of Prime Stage’s Twelfth Night. Jerz radiates the kind of intense, poised charisma we associate with old Hollywood, and she imbues the sensitive, ambivalent Cherry with so much…
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The arts are vital to our lives as humans. And if one entered the cavernous arena suspecting that 18,000 teenagers might view this as class-trip goof-around time, those suspicions evaporated with the extinguishing of the house lights. The students from Queens and Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island laughed with the actors playing the…
Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, who held elected offices in Baltimore for two decades and was elevated by voters to lead the city following the upheaval of 2015, was sentenced to three years in federal prison Thursday for a fraud scheme involving a children’s book series. | Pugh’s political fall began in March when The Baltimore…
My daughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage’s production of The Outsiders (Mar 6-15). Because Prime Stage works to incorporate the curriculum of local schools, each production contains a student matinee performance, allowing the students to connect more deeply to their school readings through theater. Prime Stage also seeks to bring each work of literature…
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I can’t seem to get into superhero movies. The non-stop CGI onslaught just leaves me cold. As an English professor who teaches classes like Shakespeare in Context and World Drama, I do a lot of reading and see a lot of local theatre. But I’m hardly a media snob. For relaxation, I often put on…
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Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. In “The Royale,” an away team is trapped in a simulated casino, where Data cheats at roulette. That’s about it. A solid teaser and surreal first act ramp up the mystery nicely; however, on my rewatch, the episode didn’t hold together very well for me. We’re…
When I tried teaching The Wizard of Oz in a literature class, I was a little frustrated with myself that I couldn’t bring the class discussion much farther than “how this book is different from the movie” and lists of one-to-one symbolism (“the yellow brick road represents the gold standard,” or ‘the scarecrow represents agriculture,…