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John Heilpern

Mary-Louise’s Bare Bum Had Me Hedda-ing for the Exits!

Has a play ever been revived with more alarming frequency than Hedda Gabler (1890)? As Ibsen’s ghost was heard protesting in Kristiania, Norway, only last weekend: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Hedda Gabler is apparently the only play that Henrik Ibsen ever wrote. While the derided revival Read More

Harold Pinter Enters the Silence Of the Long Pause

Three or four things I know about Harold Pinter who died in London on Christmas Eve, age 78:

To visit him in his Holland Park home was to enter unwittingly into a Pinter play. After greeting me at the door of his office—which was in a separate cottage in the grounds of the house Read More

America’s Chekhov Still Juicy; Sondheim’s Roadshow Blows a Flat

Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which has made a very welcome transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, couldn’t be timelier.

Mr. Foote’s gentle, comic parable about self-interest and desperation over the fate of a family estate in the playwright’s imagined small town of Harrison, Texas, first premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in Read More

Techno-Wizard Lepage’s JumboTron Faust

In last week’s column I argued in favor of the awesome simplicity of Peter Brook’s production of The Grand Inquisitor—that its complete lack of video effects amounted to a revolutionary statement nowadays. Mr. Brook has steadfastly avoided using the fashionable technological stuff (the computer-generated illusions, film projections, video images, infrared cameras, scrims and so on) Read More