Word: korder
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...