Once upon a time, I would have told you that the sweetest words in the English language were "ninety minutes, no intermission." How my heart would leap when I'd hear them! Ninety minutes seemed to promise so much: a zippy evening, a comfortably short time in the theatre seat, and a certain well-machined efficiency in the text itself. Playwrights clearly loved one-acts, too; for the past decade or so, intermissions in new dramas were scarce.
But now we're hungry for duration. We want heft; we want scope; we want structural unpredictability. In a single early October week in New York, you could see two new dramas, "The Refuge Plays," by Nathan Alan Davis, at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, and "Zoetrope," by Javier Antonio González, at Abrons Arts Center, each one clocking in at around three hours. We call long playgoing experiences "marathons," assuming there's some kind of mental stamina required, but, actually, the opposite is true. Attention molds itself to the container it's offered, and these generation-spanning, epic shows-big containers-give our pressured minds time to relax.
Davis wrote his occasionally wobbly "Refuge Plays" by expanding a one-act about a modern-day, tight-knit family living in a two-room house off the grid in the deep woods of southern Illinois. (This act, which opens the play, is the most diffuse; the later acts move faster and show more muscle.) In Arnulfo Maldonado's rough-hewn set, the house is a mossy cabin, lit with lanterns, set among tall, shadowy trees. "It feels like church, or something," a newcomer to the house says, awestruck, as ghosts and living family members slip out from the forest and through its porous rooms.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 23, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 23, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
