December 2011
72 posts
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Borges, McDonagh, Everywhere, Nowhere, Everything,...
I posted this Borges short story awhile back, as Borges is a favorite of McDonagh’s, (playwright of A Skull in Connemara, which starts rehearsals next week) and this story is a favorite of mine. I’m re-posting now in order to put it up against a description of McDonagh, which describes the playwright in a way eerily similar to Borges’ description of his subject.
“McDonagh...
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Dance and Science →
We at CENTERSTAGE are thinking about how to collaborate with other disciplines, for richer, more complex conversation and discovery. Looks like we’re not the only ones!
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Something Borrowed . . .Something Blue: New Voices...
If the stage of the Abbey Theatre is seen as the heart of the National theatre, then its Literary Department is very much the pulse. Tucked away on the upper floors of the Abbey Street theatre, the Literary Department is very much a haven for new writers, for new stories and for new voices. Aideen Howard, Literary Director, talks to Barry Houlihan and Writing.ie about the work of the Literary...
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Irish culture and Irish customs - World Cultures... →
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Exhumation of the remains of a deceased person →
Getting ready for the macabre fun that is McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara, with Irish regulations regarding “Exhumation of the remains of a deceased person.”
Christmas, Pogues style →
Mr. McDonagh’s a fan of this band, and they’ve inspired and influenced his work. Hard to imagine the playwright listening to “Frosty the Snowman,” but maybe he digs this Christmas song. Hope you do too. Merry Christmas!
“We’ve had only one criterion in choosing a play & that is - does it...”
– ~Theresa Helburn, NY Theatre Guild
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“On 30 January 1661, (symbolically the 12th anniversary of the execution of...”
– Now that is some serious payback. And sets a new standard for disposing of formerly buried crania that some of the folks in A Skull in Connemara might want to heed.
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Burials and Ancestors are for the living: two...
“Humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories…[Humanity] is a way of being mortal and relating to the dead. To be human is above all to bury.”
- Robert Pogue...
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The Long Goodbye →
In thinking about the cultural importance of burials around our upcoming production of A Skull in Connemara, I remembered talk of this book by Meghan O’Roarke.
Says Alice Gregory, “The Long Goodbye might be marketed as a memoir and written in an unflinching first-person voice, but it’s just as much a historical account of mourning rituals and a polemic against a society that...
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Padre Pio relatives protest saint’s exhumation →
Exhumation-related controversy in the Catholic community. As in Skull, it’s the Church looking to enact the exhumation and the family protesting.
Be sure to read to the end, or you’ll miss the best part - that is, the reason this guy’s a Saint…
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“It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel...”
– ~A Modest Proposal, by Dr. Jonathan Swift
Acerbic Dr. Swift. Surely someone who’d find much to relate to in the world and people of McDonagh’s A Skull in Connnemara.
Big Questions →
“…how can we imagine a new future for theater? How will we make art that speaks to the increasingly diverse and fractured communities that make up our cities? What do people want and need now, and what is the role of art?”
-Howlround piece by Deborah Cullinan; click link for more questions and thoughtful speculation.
Poteen rears its potent head in Baltimore →
“Depending on your level of sobriety, potcheen can be your best friend or your worst enemy.”
With the bleak comedy of McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara starting rehearsal shortly at CENTERSTAGE, here’s a nice mix of local flavors to consider, or sample in tandem.
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Arts flourishing in Baltimore - part 1 →
Music and arts festival comes to city: Carroll County’s Common Ground plans concert series
Common Ground on the Hill is branching out from its roots in Westminster and launching a concert series in Baltimore.
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Arts flourishing in Baltimore - part 2 →
All-free Baltimore Open Theatre to debut next season Company to showcase national, international theater and dance.
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Baltimore's blossoming ensemble theater scene -... →
Meet the participants in Baltimore’s ensemble theater scene, which is making its presence felt in much same way as the city’s underground music and art scenes, with a steady output of new, eclectic, provocative fare. …
Where there were maybe two ensemble theater groups five years ago, there are at least eight now. Most have shoestring budgets, but they all appear to be...
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Flourishing arts scene in Baltimore - part 4 →
Hippodrome uses new grant to give nonprofits a broader stage: Arts fund will give smaller organizations such as Soulful Symphony a residence at historic West Side theater.
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Grave-exhumers for Hire →
Documentary about Necropolis, a company that exhumes graves, and has been doing so since 1852. Much more organized and corporate than Mick Dowd, the would-be hero of A Skull in Connemara, but no less gruesome…
The link above is part 1 of 4. Links to the rest of the documentary are below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUH9iF3uu4s&feature=related
...
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Watchbaltiamore:
Great “Baltimore Nights & Lights” cinematography
somewhatgoldenlike:
My brother’s work. I’m impressed.
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“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may...”
– Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989
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"Triple Threats": Playwright Leaders
The history of the world stage has seen theatres run by actors, producers, directors and that relatively recent creation, the artistic director. But apart from Molière and Brecht, one species of theatremaker we haven’t typically seen at the helm of many theatres—particularly not U.S. resident theatres—is playwrights.
For 22 years, Emily Mann has been one notable exception, heading Princeton,...
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Bad (F#$*&g) Theater - Baltimore City Paper →
Audience member Lucia Diaz-French vents to the City Paper about some outlandish behavior witnessed not on stage, but in the house at a recent performance of American Buffalo in Baltimore.
Critical Care →
Glen Pearce details the frustrations of theater’s (allegedly) most influential audience(s)
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Zora Neale Hurston explains and performs a Lining...
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Author, enthnographer, and folklorist Zora Neale...
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1928 Hurricane in Song →
Each year, Post Time marks the anniversary of the 1928 hurricane. A great mystery has been the source of the tune, Somebody Got Drowned. No author has ever been found and, while lyrics first appeared in the press weeks after the storm, the first time I heard the tune was in 2003. It was from a 1974 documentary, From These Roots, by filmmaker William B. Greaves. Some new information about the...
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“Lord, Somebody Got Drowned
On the sixteenth day of September, in the year of...”
– Poem by an unknown writer about the Storm of ’28. This appeared in a story in the October 24, 1928 issue of the Palm Beach Post. The story does not give the author’s name.
Quoted in Eliot Kleinberg, Black Cloud. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003, 248-249; ―West Palm Beach Storm,‖ 1928...
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WatchLord, Somebody Got Drowned (by Daniel Cheatham)
“In the heart of the black community,and among some of the oldest neighborhoods in The City of West Palm Beach, at the intersection of Tamarind Avenue and 25th Street, sits a 1 1/2 acre lot containing the remains of some 674 unidentified men, women, and children; victims of The Great Okeechobee Hurricane. They were migrant farmers and...
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Zora Neale Hurston and the Musical Folklife of... →
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Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections,... →
Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections is a multiformat ethnographic field collection documenting African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic cultures throughout Florida. Recorded by Robert Cook, Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, Stetson Kennedy, Alton Morris, and others in conjunction with the Florida Federal Writers’...
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Zora Neale Hurston & Polk County →
“This Web-Blog is the culmination of a semester’s worth of research and analysis on several works of Zora Neale Hurston” - in particular, her play Polk County.
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Zora Neale Hurston: A Brief Biography →
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Black History and the Civil War →
Atlantic Mag piece asking “Why do so few blacks study the Civil War.” Something we may explore and respond to around The Whipping Man this spring.
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“The storm of 1928: From the archives of the Fort Lauderdale Daily News,...”
– The storm of 1928: Hurricane Hits City Sunday - From the archives of the Fort Lauderdale Daily News - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
The massive and destructive storm recalled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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A Preview of GLEAM
Gleam
By Bonnie Lee Moss Rattner
Based on Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Directed by Marion McClinton
Jan 4–Feb 5, 2012
At 16, Janie Mae Crawford faces a marriage of convenience and a life of quiet drudgery. Instead, she embarks on a journey that brings successes and losses enough for several lifetimes—a passage to fulfillment so singular that it manages to speak for all...
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ZORA! Festival →
It’ll be the 125th anniversary of Historic Eatonville at this year’s annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. January 21-29, 2012.
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