Some plays are born strange, some achieve strangeness, and some have strangeness thrust upon them (or upon their characters, at least). We consider one of each type herein.
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Anthony Giardina,
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book club,
bullying,
Candide,
Capitol Hill,
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Charles Isherwood,
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City of Conversation,
Columbia University,
Columbine,
comfort zone,
conservatives,
degenerative disease,
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Frank Zappa,
Georgetown,
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grand guignol,
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homophobia,
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Little Shop of Horrors,
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Sweeney Todd,
The City of Conversation,
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Vietnam War,
Waiting for Godot,
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I am not sure what Shepard is doing in Shepherdstown. The Contemporary American Theater Festival held there is dedicated to performing ‘new American plays.’ There’s nothing new to me about Sam Shepard’s play Heartless; it seems distinctly old hat. I went back to a review I wrote of one of his plays for my college newspaper in 1970, and a number of the things I wrote about that play (The Holy Ghostly) could be said about Heartless. I commented how characters migrate into each other, how they become composites of various characters, how there is no predictable logic to their interactions, and how the drama loses the sense of being story-telling about distinct persons. I compared what Shepard did to abstract painting. And, on the evidence of Heartless, it’s still true.
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Luigi Pirandello,
Margot White,
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Sam Shephard,
Samuel Beckett,
Susannah Hoffman,
The Holy Ghostly,
Theater of the Absurd Comments Off on Old Hat But Interesting: Shepard’s HEARTLESS at Shepherdstown’s CATF |
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