#as-you-like-it

#as-you-like-it

Wallace Shawn's new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, opens with a provocative monologue about a 25-year-old's relationship with a 13-year-old girl, challenging societal norms.

Irvine Welsh stated that Trainspotting was not the most obvious book to be successful, nor was it the most obvious movie or stage play. It has confounded expectations, especially his own.

Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story.

Lorena Bradford started monthly tours in American Sign Language, established a program for individuals with memory loss, and brought in medical students to learn soft skills to apply in their caregiving. 'I was a sub-department of one,' she joked to writer Emma Cieslik, who spoke with Bradford over Zoom and at the NGA about her own circuitous path into the profession, and the future of the field of museum accessibility.

What Maggie O'Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare's wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people ... and give them status beside this great man. ... [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.

Mr. Darcy is its stern romantic lead. He has a massive income from his estate - 10,000 pounds a year - and, according to the novel's witty protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, just as large of a stick up his ass. Jane Austen was not one to go for lengthy physical descriptions of things, but we do know that when he enters a room, he draws people's attention with a "fine, tall person, handsome features," and a "noble mien."

Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia.

It's all happening 400 years ago, and in London there's a riot happening, there's a mob out in the streets,

"Heated Rivalry," a low-budget Canadian series that began streaming on HBO Max late last year, quickly made the leap from unexpected word-of-mouth success to full-blown cultural phenomenon. The show, which follows a pair of professional hockey players who fall for each other, has been name-checked by everyone from the N.H.L. commissioner to Zohran Mamdani; its two young leads, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, just served as Olympic torch-bearers.

Seeing this remarkable movie reminded me that we cannot look away from real-life tragedies

Admittedly, this one came with a fair few red flags, from the casting of Margot Robbie (simply too old, Cathy is a teenager) and Jacob Elordi (simply too white, Heathcliff, while his origins are uncertain, is described as darker skinned) to the unhinged marketing and crass brand tie-ins. Nevertheless, I was still excited to see it. So why did I leave the cinema not only bored, but feeling a little bit sad?

Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true. It's curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity.

Shuffling under the mortal coil this week (aka hosting the Gabfest), it's our OG players Steve, Dana, and Julia. Like a morose Danish prince contemplating a human skull, they gaze upon the Oscar nominated , based on the novel by Maggie O'Farrell inspired by William Shakespeare's life. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Hamnet has brought some critics to tears and left others cold. Our hosts share where they landed.

For playwright Kallan Dana, having Racecar Racecar Racecar produced at Artists Repertory Theatre is a special homecoming. "I feel so lucky to get to come back and do a show there," she says. "The Portland theater scene was such a huge part of my childhood and adolescence." Now living in Brooklyn, Dana grew up in Multnomah Village. Theater was a huge part of her childhood, her parents often took her to Artists Rep shows,

We've seen Robert Icke's Oedipus as a political thriller on Broadway last fall, Shayok Misha Chowdhury's revival of the choral Gospel at Colonus at Little Island in the summer (if you missed that, I recommend a tape of the 1985 production on YouTube), and now, Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place at the Shed, a version of Antigone turned into a bourgeois family drama.