Daughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage’s production of The Outsiders (Mar 6-15)

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 to life authentically. To that end, The Outsiders was cast age-appropriately, with each actor being…

On the Hatred of Literature

Going back to Plato—perhaps the first hater of literature on record—philosophers and religious authorities have attacked art for the same reasons our professors taught us to deconstruct and distrust it: because it is unpredictable, unreasonable and often inconsistent with their preferred politics or morality. It was also a lesson that was destined, in the years that followed, to seep off campus. Even as New Historicism fell out of fashion in…

Outline of a female executive assistant seated at the front desk of a retro office, with a smiling male executive in a business suit waiting for her to finish her phone call so he can ask her something.

How 15 minutes I spent with a laptop in 1991 created 2 FT jobs and a promotion

In a section of my dissertation, I dove into office gender politics of in the late 1940s, in order to explore just what Arthur Miller’s original audiences would have thought about the wire recorder that appears in Death of a Salesman. In the play, Willy Loman’s boss Howard thinks of the wire recorder as a domestic plaything, but at the time it was marketed as more reliable for taking dictation…