F. Murray Abraham’s performance as Shylock for Theatre for a New Audience touches greatness in every aspect of an immensely challenging role. The magnificent veteran actor inhabits Shylock’s soul in ways that had me riveted.
The key that Mr. Abraham has unlocked is Shylock’s humanity. Yet he does so without a trace of the Read More
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W.H. Auden, and indeed this week New Yorkers would be forgiven for feeling they are drowning in a sea of well-meaning but useless words, and futile TV images, as the city observes the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11. For the real narrative of that terrible day is already inscribed in Read More
I teach two writing courses at Mt. Holyoke College, normally an orderly drill in which I try to supply useful strategies for a series of expressive tasks.
But of course “normally” vaporized this year as soon as the semester began, and I found myself, like every teacher in the country, faced with the question of Read More
Later Auden , by Edward Mendelson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pages, $30.
In the late 1940′s, W.H. Auden became enamored of the idea that every writer’s mind is a household containing three personalities. T.S. Eliot’s, he wrote, included an archdeacon, an old peasant grandmother and a young boy who liked to play practical jokes. Read More
