Word: sellarsization
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"When I direct Shakespeare," theatrical innovator Peter Sellars once said, "the first thing I do is go to the text for cuts. I go through to find the passages that are real heavy, that really are not needed, places where the language has become obscure, the places where there is...
In the sober matter of staging Shakespeare, such audaciousness is hard to resist -- though a lot of Chicago theatergoers have been able to. Typically, a third of the people who show up at the Goodman Theatre to see Sellars' ingenious reworking of The Merchant of Venice walk out before the...
The play has been transplanted from the teeming, multicultural world of 15th century Venice, Italy, to the teeming, multicultural world of 1994 Venice Beach, California, where Sellars lives when he isn't setting Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, putting King Lear in a Lincoln Continental or deconstructing other classic plays...
Some of this seems to be sheer perversity, but the real shock of Sellars' production is how well it works both theatrically and thematically. The racial casting, for instance, is a brilliant way of defusing the play's anti-Semitism -- turning it into a metaphor for prejudice and materialism in...
LITTLE MORE THAN A DECADE ago, opera in the U.S. was regarded by many as an outdated European cultural import that held little relevance for contemporary Americans. Beset by high production costs, disastrous deficits, a declining talent pool and a static, aging repertory, American opera companies seemed to be the...