On the set of Wild, at American Repertory Theater (Photo: Maggie Hall-Nile Scott Studios) Most of the thinkers I follow closely are actively exploring alternative models, ones that can impact our ability to continue as a species on this planet. That search for a change is summed up by Daniel Schmachtenberger: Rather than just iterative […]
American Repertory Theater
Movement in the Macro
Like the difference between weather and climate, big patterns are not easy to see. Trying to tap into the larger forms can feel counterintuitive, furtive, confusing. As the old saying goes, no matter how good their eyes, the short person can never get the overview. My personal bookmark for that problem of perception is a […]
Moby-Dick: A Musical Reckoning
More than any other American writer, Herman Melville creates a distortion in the fabric of the author spacetime continuum. A complex and moody man whose early books gave no indication he was capable of writing the greatest American novel, Melville engenders a devotion today that is famously passionate, intractably opinionated and deeply personal. (Melvilleans have […]
Making The Old Feel New
Anna of Cleves (Brittney Mack, at center) performs “Get Down” in SIX, written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Photo: Liz Lauren We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail. –Greil Marcus It’s a long standing theme on Slow Muse: Storytelling is powerful, […]
The Thread
The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or […]
Dragons, Dalmatians and Dancing Gorillas
Hilma af Klint, from A Work on Flowers, Mosses and Lichen (© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk/Photo: Moderna Museet, Albin Dahlström) And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and […]
Endlings
Celine Song (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) A few years ago I was rhapsodizing with a friend about how much I love powerful storytelling, the kind that takes you so fully into another reality. Was the topic W. G. Sebald, George R. R. Martin, Rachel Cusk? I can’t remember what launched me, but the response […]
The Many Faces of Othello
Ira Aldridge playing Othello in the 19th century, from a painting by James Northcote Humans have a built-in pattern detection facility that is a key method for making sense of things. Making sense is, after all, an essential survival skill. Barraged daily by a firehose of sensory data, we have to employ some means of […]
The Night of the Iguana
Tennessee Williams (photo: Yousuf Karsh) It is an artistic exercise of a particular kind to comb through the books and plays of the past and to find those that achieve resonance—or a fresh reading—for contemporary audiences. American Repertory Theater has taken that tack in past seasons (a production of Paradise Lost, written by Clifford Odets […]
Shaping the Story
From “The Shape She Makes” at American Repertory Theater (Photo: American Rep Theater) Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your […]