Word: korder
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...threats of mayhem. These are everyday realities in many big American cities, unbearable yet borne, mostly in grim, self-imposed blindness and deafness to what is all around. They somehow become more resistant to willful ignorance when placed on the stage in a play as eerily uninflected as Howard Korder's The Lights and a production as epic and energized as Mark Wing-Davy's at New York City's Lincoln Center. Without preaching, without invective, without in any way distorting urban life, The Lights makes one ashamed to dwell in a U.S. city and absorb its brutish selfishness...
...threats of mayhem. These are everyday realities in many big cities, unbearable yet borne, mostly in grim, self- imposed blindness and deafness to what is all around. They somehow become more resistant to willful ignorance when placed on the stage in a play as eerily uninflected as Howard Korder's The Lights and a production as epic and energized as Mark Wing-Davy's at New York City's Lincoln Center. Without preaching, without invective, without in any way distorting urban life, The Lights makes one ashamed to dwell in a city and absorb its brutish selfishness...
...Korder, one of the most promising American playwrights, reaches back in style more than half a 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 the way we live now. 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 back alleys evoke the urban sense of living with the decaying legacy of the past...
...lightweight, ingratiating style can bear. The first act is expository and lamely comic, acutely lacking the menace and madness that make the second act crackle. Sometimes the play is a chilling rumination on '80s greed. Sometimes it's merely upper Miami Vice. In either vein, it is supremely cynical. Korder asserts with equal force that run-amuck individualism is appalling and that it is the one sure path to triumph...
...Film Society, a story of a failed teacher in South Africa, where the writer spent much of his youth. His latest effort, The Substance of Fire, is at Lincoln Center after a sold-out run at the smaller Playwrights Horizons. Structurally, the problems are the opposite of the Korder play's. The first half, about a family dispute over a publishing empire, surges with believable life. The second half, about the clan's Holocaust-scarred patriarch, clanks with calculation...