Word: korder
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...19th century. We've seen his type many times before: one of those restless individualists who helped settle the rapidly expanding American continent. Yet the trek he makes during more than 40 years--from Manhattan Island down the Ohio River Valley to St. Louis, Mo., and beyond--in Howard Korder's extraordinary new play, The Hollow Lands, leaves most of the romance behind. The journey is populated by criminals and charlatans and half-crazed messiahs; there are coldblooded shootings that go unpunished, families separated without even a pause for goodbye, dreams that always seem just off the map. "I have...
...Korder (Search and Destroy, Boys' Life) has specialized in cynical, Mametesque comedy, but with The Hollow Lands he raises the stakes and instantly leaps to the front rank of American dramatists. It is a beautifully written work; Korder seems to have invented the very language of his 19th century characters--formalized yet colloquial, terse yet grandly poetic. "Shall we speak of profit?" urges Samuel Markham Hayes, the Pied Piper who lures Newman west. "You will see it fiftyfold, I guarantee it. Shall we tell of kings? Look into the glass, you will find the measure of one. Shall we dream...
Director David Chambers has shaped Korder's sprawling scenes with a conductor's feel for the mix of noise and quiet, action and repose, and Ming Cho Lee has designed some of the most strikingly eccentric sets in recent memory, full of skewed angles and semiabstract swatches of color. Michael Stuhlbarg, as Newman, spans nearly half a century with utter conviction, and Mark Harelik fires up the stage as Hayes...
...Howard Korder's Search and Destroy is a disturbing parable about how to act reprehensibly and not get caught. Peter Kelly's new production of this play has three power sources: an explosive script, a kinetic cast and a hip new theater...
...Korder, one of the most promising American playwrights, reaches back in style more than a half-century to the era before the dominance of kitchen-sink realism, when the American theater was expressionistic and experimental, poetically and politically inflamed. Despite a few sentimental false notes, he is painfully apt about life in the U.S. today. But his play is set timelessly in "the modern era." Marina Draghici's set reinforces this reach for the enduring: its Art Deco windows and wire fences, beer gardens and alleys evoke the urban sense of living with the decaying legacy of the past...