There was a time when high culture was high, low culture was low, and never the ‘twain should meet. The middle-class intellectuals who attended plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov likely returned home to listen to Beethoven and Bach, later retiring to bed with a good, fat novel by George Eliot or Leo Tolstoy. The popular […]
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Around the corner from where it debuted in 1907, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance is being revived by the New Yiddish Rep. When the play transferred to Broadway in 1923, the cast and crew were arrested and convicted on charges of obscenity. But the drama, about the Russian brothel proprietor Yankl (Shane Baker) who wants to buy his […]
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Kafka, of course, is a genre now, just as “experimental” refers to a very specific style instead of an attempt at creating something new. David Lynch has become an adjective as well, so that his aesthetic of sugary pop music and violent imagery can now be mass produced, like Hello Kitty. Judgment on a Gray Beach, then, is best […]
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