- Joan Acocella: David Gordon’s “Dancing Henry Five.”
David Gordon has always been postmodern dance’s premier minimalist. So you could say he was almost showing off when, in 2004, he took on Shakespeare’s “Henry V”—with its massed armies, its take-charge king, its pretty princess—and made his own . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Toni Morrison’s “Desdemona,” at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.
Historically speaking, the stage is a notoriously difficult space for novelists to fill. Henry James is a famous example of a brilliant writer whose dreams of footlight glory were not meant to be. And while Saul Bellow’s “The Last Analysis” is a lovely play, it’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Art
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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Vermeer’s Masterpiece ‘The Milkmaid.’” Through Nov. 29. | “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’” Through Jan. 3. | “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915.” . . ....
- James Wood: Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” review.
Most of the prose writers acclaimed for “writing beautifully” do no such thing; such praise is issued comprehensively, like the rain on the just and the unjust. Mostly, what’s admired as beautiful is ordinary; or sometimes it’s too obviously beautiful, feebly fine—what . . ....
- Peter Schjeldahl: “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” at the Met.
If the title of the Met’s “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” suggests a unit in social studies, that’s apt. The survey of more than a hundred pictures flogs themes of national history and, well, “character.” Pedagogical wall texts loom. But . . ....
- Hilton Als: “Merchant of Venice” and “On the Levee.”
Part of the reason that Shakespeare remains one of the handful of writers who engage generation after generation of readers has to do with the way he is taught, or, at least, was taught in the New York City public-school system of my youth. Back then, in the mid . . ....
- Race @ Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Ruthlessness of a rhetorical kind is part of the fun of David Mamet’s new play (directed by the author), his latest exercise in contrarian provocation. “Do you know what you can say? To a black man. On the subject of race?” Henry Brown (David Alan Grier), a black lawyer, says to Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), a rich, white potential client who is accused of raping...
- Hilton Als: Mitchell Zuckoff’s “Robert Altman.”
Mitchell Zuckoff’s new oral biography “Robert Altman” is a brilliantly researched, near-cinematic evocation of how the boy from Kansas City became one of the twentieth century’s greatest native Americans. Altman, who came of age as a TV director, was his generation’s . . ....
- Hilton Als: “Early Plays” by Eugene O’Neill, “CQ/CX,” “Rx” reviews.
The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, and sometimes you don’t want it to happen, but you’re powerless to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: David Ives’s “Venus in Fur.”
The cruelty of women! For Severin—the endlessly needy anti-hero of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s short, intense erotic novel, “Venus in Furs,” published in 1870—there is no love without denial. We first learn about this Galician nobleman’s passionate, almost clinical . . ....
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Diane Keaton’s “Then Again.”
Part of what makes Diane Keaton’s memoir, “Then Again,” truly amazing is that she does away with the star’s “me” and replaces it with a daughter’s “I.” Writing in a collaboration of sorts with her late mother, Dorothy . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: “Porgy and Bess,” reimagined by Diane Paulus.
As audience members took their seats before a recent performance of the director Diane Paulus’s politically radical and dramaturgically original musical adaptation of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin’s “American folk opera” “Porgy and Bess” (at the American Repertory . . ....
- Jill Lepore: The fight between Henry Luce and Harold Ross.
Henry Luce, who was born in Tengchow, China, used to say he wished he’d been born in Oskaloosa, Iowa. “An American can always explain himself satisfactorily by citing where he comes from,” Luce said. He’d have given anything for a home town in the . . ....
- Joan Acocella: David Hallberg in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
David Hallberg, of American Ballet Theatre, has spent a lot of time in “prince” roles. You can see why. He is six feet one and blindingly handsome, and also—a rare feature—extremely sweet. That’s nice, but you have to wonder: Is there a . . ....
- Hilton Als: “Sleep No More,” at the McKittrick Hotel.
Even though the shadowy, mannered, and morally terrible world that Alfred Hitchcock created as a young filmmaker in pre-Second World War Britain and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” provide some of the inspiration for “Sleep No More” (a Punchdrunk production, in collaboration with Emursive, at the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” review.
Schappell’s second collection is framed by two stories about a woman named Heather. She first appears as a high-school student, “a good girl with a bad reputation,” who dreams of becoming a marine biologist. In the later story, she tries to discourage her teen-age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Outlaw Album” review.
In this collection’s twelve stories, Woodrell expands upon the unremittingly bleak portrait of Ozark life drawn in his novel “Winter’s Bone” and in the acclaimed film based on it. In one, a young woman tends to a rapist who was brain-damaged when she . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Dead Republic.”
Doyle’s ninth novel, the concluding volume of a trilogy that began with “A Star Called Henry,” chronicles the return to Ireland, after almost thirty years of exile in America, of Henry Smart, a former I.R.A. assassin. The first section, in which Henry works with John Ford . . ....
- Hilton Als: Raúl Esparza in Sondheim’s “Anyone Can Whistle.”
There’s something wonderfully dirty about the thirty-nine-year-old Cuban-American actor Raúl Esparza. He’s a leading man who is expert at infusing his roles with illicit feelings, and he can also bring a perverse cuddliness and joy to his gloomy characters. In . . ....
- David Denby: “Contagion” review.
You’re a school nurse who sends home a little boy flushed with fever; you reach into a bowl of peanuts at a bar; you pick up a cell phone left on a counter. It doesn’t take much contact to become infected in “Contagion,” Steven . . ....
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Natalie Dykstra’s “Clover Adams” review.
Born in 1843 to a wealthy, intellectual Boston family, Marian (Clover) Hooper moved in the most illustrious circles of nineteenth-century America. Henry James called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; Henry Adams married her. In Washington, she became a celebrated hostess, rode horses, and, at the age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Treuer’s “Rez Life” review.
8220;Indians are famous for a few things—for a kind of off-brand environmentalism, Sitting Bull, and broken English, and most of all for being poor,” Treuer writes in this study of Native American reservations. His upbringing on an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota makes him adept at . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “American Egyptologist” by Jeffrey Abt, review.
Born in Illinois in 1865, James Henry Breasted turned an early interest in the ministry and a talent for languages into a remarkable career as America’s first formally trained Egyptologist. He specialized in the recording of inscriptions and wanted nothing less than “the recopying and republication of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Wyatt Mason: “The Art of Fielding,” review.
In Chad Harbach’s first novel, “The Art of Fielding” (Little, Brown; $25.99), Henry Skrimshander arrives for his first day at Westish College, a “slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan,” with a beat-up copy of a book . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Remnick: “Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports” review.
Sports, not religion, is the opiate of the people. Think of it in terms of time. Mass takes about an hour. You’re lucky if a “Monday Night Football” game is over in three. The average Yankees-Red Sox game last year ran about the length of . . . (Subscription required.)...
