Use the form on the right to contact us.
You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
123 Street Avenue, City Town, 99999
(123) 555-6789
email@address.com
You can set your address, phone number, email and site description in the settings tab.
Link to read me page with more information.
search for me
1968: Humanity learns the location of the Planet of the Apes.
Last year, a brilliant new play premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company called Mr. Burns, a Post-Apocalyptic Play. Everyone who reviewed it told their readers far too much about it. Everyone but me... he said modestly.
The cycle repeated itself when Mr. Burns opened last month at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. So I wrote this for the Village Voice.
Lou Reed was one the greatest American artists in any medium. Slate invited me to compile a playlist of 10 of his post-Velvet Underground songs as way for newcomers to sample his 40-year solo catalog. I was honored. You can read that here.
When Rolling Stone reported Lou's death at the age of 71 yesterday morning -- it's not like I knew him personally, but something about his songwriting, especially on The Blue Mask album from 1982 and everything afterward, makes me feel first-name intimacy with him -- I started tweeting my recollections as a longtime admirer. I was introduced to his work and his wry worldview by New York in 1989. I heard the single, "Dirty Blvd.," on the radio, and I got the CD from the Columbia House mail-order club.
Read MoreI review Stephen Spotswood's new play In the Forest, She Grew Fangs, as well as Aaron Posner's oddly inert new Romeo & Juliet for the Folger Theater, in this week's Washington City Paper. Available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away gratis.
Oh, and the costume and props designer for And In the Forest is Jesse Shipley, not Jenny. My mistake.
Naturally I thought of a theory about why one of the songs I mentioned affects me so profoundly as soon as producer Nick Fountain turned off the mics in NPR's Studio 46 and episode #161 of Pop Culture Happy Hour -- on which I was honored to be a guest -- wrapped. But fortunately for you, dear listener, the three full-time panelists on this weeks's show -- Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and Trey Graham -- were all on top of their games. Their usual fourth man, my pal-for-life Glen Weldon, was on top of a raft or something, vacationing in Grand Cayman.
You can hear the episode in web browser here or download it from iTunes here.
Read More
This is the first comic book I ever bought, from one of those HEY KIDS! COMICS! spinner racks in a 7-Eleven somewhere on the south side of Chicago. I think I had stepped out from some kind of an event for a distant relative. I was very young.
Anyway, I found it again in a Midtown Manhattan comics shop this weekend. When I pointed it out to my girlfriend, she said she wanted to buy it for me. A sweet gesture, especially considering the price tag of $6 -- 800 percent what I paid for my long-lost copy in what the indicia at the bottom of page one tells me was 1986. Some of the best comics ever published came out that year: Watchmen, MAUS, The Dark Knight Returns, Love & Rockets, etc., etc. I wouldn't find that out about those until later. They didn't sell those comics in 7-Elevens.
Captain Phillips, the seemingly little-embellished new thriller based on a 2009 hijacking at sea, got me thinking about what sort of responsibilities filmmakers have -- and we as audiences have -- when approaching a compressed a dramatized account of true events. You can read that piece over at Monkey See today.
Read More
Admittedly, ALIENS is a film I've loved unconditionally since I was a kid. I need very little prompting to think about it, and only a little more prompting than that to write about it. But a deleted scene from that 27-year-old movie highlights what is, to me, the sole flaw in Alfonso Curaon's still-fantastic new space movie Gravity, and how audience expectations have changed in the generation since ALIENS. This is the subject of my first piece for Slate, which you can read here.
Nancy Robinette & Megan Anderson in After the Revolution. Photo: Stan Barouh/Theater J.
I was a bigger fan of Studio Theatre's production of Amy Herzog's 4,000 Miles earlier this year than I am of Theater J's new staging of its companion play, After the Revolution.
I can't fault director Eleanor Holdridge's staging of the latter for that; I just connected more strongly to the material in 4,000 Miles. Getting to see two marvelous actors, Tanya Hicken and Nancy Robinette, offer their takes on the same character -- a close approximation of Herzog's grandmother -- in 4,000 Miles and Revolution, respectively, within a half-year of each other was fun.
I review After the Revolution in today's Washington City Paper, along with Woolly Mammoth's production of Lisa D'Amour's Detroit, which is a nice showcase for some of Woolly's favorite actors -- and mine, too.
