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The Rumpus Review of War Music
If you live in San Francisco you’ve probably seen the signs on storefronts and taxis—the posters eye-catching and cryptic: War Music, flanked by a wing and a gun. I chased down this production,...
View ArticleStaging A Beautiful Apocalypse
Today is the birthday of one of my very favorite living writers, Samuel R. Delany.(I spoke once here before about how I share with Junot Diaz an abiding love for Delany’s work.)All it took for him to...
View ArticleTheater-Wise: A Very Short Q&A With Niki Selken from Ko Labs
A couple days ago, I saw this short blog post in Publishers’ Weekly that asked whether writers could make more money by putting on literary performances than by selling books (short answer: no.)This...
View ArticleNew Fire
La Bloga interviews writer and director Cherríe Moraga about NEW FIRE–TO PUT THINGS RIGHT AGAIN, which premieres this week at Brava Theater in San Francisco. Moraga discusses how the play’s structure...
View ArticleHelp Support The Grimaldis
Bay Area local Dane Ballard is the writer and producer of The Grimaldis, a musical about the decline of a show-biz family:“For generations, the Grimaldi family has thrilled audiences the world over....
View ArticleBrecht in Love
Who would’ve thought Bertolt Brecht would turn out to be such a romantic? While his newly released Love Poems are surprisingly erotic compared to his better-known plays, they retain that Marxist flair...
View ArticleResurrecting a Soviet Satire
The New York Times takes a look at Dying For It, a new adaption of The Suicide, a 1928 satirical play written (but never performed) under Stalinism.Related Posts:Mirrors and WindowsBrecht in LoveBooks...
View ArticleHarry Potter Headed to the Stage
J.K. Rowling announced on Twitter that she is writing a new play to tell portions of Harry’s stories that the books skipped over. The new stage show include Harry’s parents, Lily and James Potter, but...
View ArticleAnother Lost Work by a Dead Writer
If it seems that “lost” books, short stories, and everything else are coming out of the woodwork, well, they are. The Strand magazine has just published Twixt Cup and Lip, an early play by William...
View ArticlePicturing a New Shakespeare
At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier reviews a new collection that gathers posters for productions of Shakespeare from around the world. This collection has posters from fifty-five countries, ranging from...
View ArticleBinge-Watching Bolaño
The latest installment in the trend of adapting the unadaptable is none other than Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a sprawling, digressive novel to which director Robert Falls has allotted five hours of...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Mark Leyner
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Mark Leyner about his new book Gone with the Mind, pressuring the novel form, being a purist Dionysian, and artisanal pap smears.This is an edited transcript of the book...
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No, Lolita
His face is so large, like the moon, looming. His eyes blaze and his whole body crashes into hers like a continent. Forests of hair where she has none, he is a man. She is a girl.Opposites...
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #23: Plays to Devour on the Page and the Stage
Of course it’s tremendous to see a play on stage, but reading a play, its script, is a pleasure in its own right. I think for many of us the notion of reading plays was ruined in high school, what with...
View ArticleTragedy in Spades: a Crime Documentary (the Play)
Probably internationally acclaimed playwright Liza Birkenmeier, dubbed “the next big thing” by someone somewhere, who wrote national bestseller “Funny Women #136: Recommendation Letter” is also here to...
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Baltimore, Offline
When I tell people I’m from Baltimore, they always have two questions for me. “Have you seen The Wire?” and “How do you feel about the Freddie Gray thing?” People are still posting about it online,...
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Discovering Septimania
On an April evening in 1978, just climbing out of the sulfurous gray of an English winter, I found myself talking about Emanuel Swedenborg with a Hungarian at a long wooden table on Alpha Road. The...
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The Rumpus Interview with Jamie Brickhouse
Propelled by sharp wit and fierce hilarity, Jamie Brickhouse’s Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother is a smart, deftly crafted memoir that chronicles his intimate, near-fatal...
View ArticleReimagining The Tempest
How to create a credible contemporary novel from a work written four centuries ago for the stage? In a New York Times Book Review, author Emily St. John Mandel reviews Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a...
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The Rumpus Interview with Abraham Burickson
Odyssey Works is a San Francisco-based theater company (though any prolonged investigation of their project calls into question taxonomic designation, and so, already, I am failing to describe them...
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