Word: theater
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every day, all across the country, children under the age of 17 walk into their neighborhood video stores and rent movies that they would not be able to see in a theater. Sometimes the youthful customers are content with somewhat less grisly fare, like the immensely successful Friday the 13th series. The ease with which minors can rent and watch such nightmarish visions has alarmed parent organizations around the country. These groups contend that while sexually provocative movies usually carry at least an R rating, "slasher" films containing explicit violence are often unrated and available to youngsters...
...wide in his search for material to transform into his own dramas. He rivaled Shakespeare, the literary grave-robber supreme, in his audacious choice of sources. Twenties cinema, 18th century musicals, Renaissance history, Jack London stories; in Brecht's hands they all became the stuff of his proletarian "epic" theater...
...works rather than getting absorbed in the character and stories. If Andrei Serban's seminew production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan shows anything, it's that a playwright's intentions can be taken far beyond the level of good taste and still work as great theater. Assuming of course, that your idea of great theater is irony applied with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer...
...with a Dario Fo farce, has been one long excursion into the Heart of Snideness. With the possible exception of Sweettable at the Richilieu, every play this season has been dripping with satire, burlesque and irony. And perhaps this is all that we can ask out of modern theater...
With the pastiche ideology of post-modernism the theater has lost the appetite for the strong emotions and extravagant gestures that once were associated with the word "dramatic." Somehow, a cheesy melodrama like Dietrich's Dishonoured or Bogart's Maltese Falcon seems truer to the human heart than any new work I've seen on a stage in years. The theater, always a comfortable haven for dry intellectuals, may well have hypertrophied to the point that it is just an expensive substitute for The David Letterman Show...