The Plays of David Mamet: Games of Manipulation and Power

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (13) ◽  
pp. 77-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry I. Schvey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Business ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Business Values ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
World Premiere ◽  
One Act

David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947, is one of the most talented and eagerly watched young playwrights in America today, whose work has also found a ready response among British audiences. After such plays asSexual Perversity in Chicago(1974).American Buffalo(1975) andEdmond(1982), hisGlengarry Glen Ross(1982), dedicated to Harold Pinter, had its world premiere in London at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, and subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for the best American play in 1984. In the same year,American Buffalo(seen briefly on Broadway in 1977) won an award for best revival, while the London production ofEdmond, which opened at the Royal Court in December 1985, was favourably received by English critics in contrast to its mixed reception in New York. In addition to Mamet's work for the stage, he has written the screenplays for the filmsThe VerdictandThe Postman Always Rings Twice. Noteworthy for their sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of American speech, including its unmistakable penchant for banalities and obscenities. Mamet's best plays, as the accompanying essay demonstrates, carry with them an implicit attack on American business values, usually through a confrontation between two individuals, one of whom tries to exploit or dominate the other. The interview which follows was conducted in New York City on 2 January 1986 following a performance of Mamet's latest work, a double bill of one–act plays entitledThe ShawlandPrairie du Chien, selected by Mamet's friend and close associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher, to reopen the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.

Lincoln Center Commissions

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 451-469
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Individual Style

For the opening week of the new Philharmonic Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962, Barber composed a piano concerto in honor of the 100th anniversary of his publisher. The concerto was tailored to the technical prowess and individual style of John Browning, reflecting the Russian influence of his piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne. The second movement was a reworking of an earlier piece, Elegy, written for Manfred Ibel, a young art student and amateur flute player, to whom Barber dedicated his piano concerto. This chapter details Barber’s compositional process and influences for each movement of the concerto and describes the enthusiastic reception of the debut performance. Nearing completion of the concerto, Barber was invited to Russia as the first American composer ever to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers, where he freely discussed his compositional philosophy and methods. For the concerto, Barber won his second Pulitzer Prize and the Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. His second composition for the opening season of Lincoln Center was Andromache’s Farewell, for soprano and orchestra. Based on a scene from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, the piece displayed deep emotional expression and striking imagery. With a superior opera singer, Martina Arroyo, singing the solo part, the success of Andromache’s Farewell presaged Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra.

Samuel Barber

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Samuel Barber ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
Lincoln Center

Samuel Barber (1910–1981) was one of the most important and honored American composers of the twentieth century. Writing in a great variety of musical forms—symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal music, chamber music—he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes such famous compositions as the Adagio for Strings, the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, and his two operas, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, a commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York. Generously documented by letters, sketchbooks, original musical manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this book covers Barber’s entire career and all of his compositions. The biographical material on Barber is closely interspersed with a discussion of his music, displaying Barber’s creative processes at work from his early student compositions to his mature masterpieces. The book also provides the social context in which this major composer grew: his education; how he built his career; the evolving musical tastes of American audiences; his relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti and such musical giants as Serge Koussevitzky, Arturo Toscanini, Vladimir Horowitz; and the role of radio in the promotion of his music. A testament to the significance of neo-Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important American musical figure.

Practical Aesthetics and the Formation of the Atlantic Theater Company

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New York University ◽  
Independent Films ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Spring Awakening ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Night Heron

The Atlantic Theater Company has been one of Off-Broadway's most successful theatre companies over the past twenty years, having won twelve Tony Awards, eight Lucille Lortel Awards, thirteen Obie Awards, and three Outer Critics Circle Awards. The company, originally founded in 1983 by the playwright David Mamet and the actor William H. Macy, has mounted over one hundred plays, many by new writers. Included among its successes are Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory and Writer's Block, the revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo, Celebration and The Room by Harold Pinter, Mojo and Night Heron by Jez Butterworth, and the new musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening, which won the 2007 Tony for best new musical. But producing plays is only part of Atlantic's mission: it also runs the Atlantic Acting School, which operates both as a private conservatoire and an undergraduate training studio in conjunction with New York University. Its curriculum focuses on Practical Aesthetics, the acting technique developed by Mamet and Macy. Mary McCann, in conversation here with NTQ Contributing Editor Ian Watson, is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company and Director of the Atlantic Acting School, where she also teaches. She continues to act, having appeared in many of the company's productions, on Broadway, on television, and in several independent films. The conversation took place over two meetings at the Atlantic Acting School in New York City, on 25 April and 5 June 2007.

“It Brought the World to this Coast”: The World Premiere of Eugene O'Neill'S Lazarus Laughed at the Pasadena Community Playhouse

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
W.D. King
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The World ◽  
World Premiere ◽  
One Act

Almost two years after its completion in May of 1926, Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed received its premiere production—not in New York. This “Play for an Imaginative Theatre,” clearly the most theatrically demanding of all of O'Neill's works, made its first appearance in California, at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, opening April 9, 1928. Not since the days when his earliest one-act plays were produced at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, had an O'Neill play failed to result in a New York production.

Google Hangout with Annie Baker, Playwright 1/25/16, 2:33 PM

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Genevieve Yue
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
The Past

Genevieve Yue interviews playwright Annie Baker, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Flick focuses on the young employees of a single-screen New England movie house. Baker is one of the most critically lauded playwrights to emerge on the New York theater scene in the past ten years, in part due to her uncompromising commitment to experimentation and disruption. Baker intrinsically understands that arriving at something meaningful means taking a new way. Accordingly, Baker did not want to conduct a traditional interview for Film Quarterly. After running into each other at a New York Film Festival screening of Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015)—both overwhelmed by the film—Yue and Baker agreed to begin their conversation by choosing a film neither of them had seen before and watching it together. The selection process itself led to a long discussion, which led to another, and then finally, to the Gmail hangout that forms the basis of the interview.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Dieter Hacker's Mask for Timon of Athens

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-90
Author(s):  
GJW
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Stage Design ◽  
York Public Library ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
The One ◽  
Timon Of Athens

For the well-received 1990 Bochum Schauspielhaus production of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Dieter Hacker, one of Germany's leading artists and stage designers, created fifty-four masks, including the one on the opposite page for Timon himself (Figure I). This mask, Hacker's designs, and photographs of the production were seen in the recent exhibition “Contemporary Stage Design from German and Austria” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, presented in collaboration with the Goethe House and German Cultural Center in New York.

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