In the nation's capital, the Washington Stage Guild production of G.K. Chesterton’s play “Magic” has been extended through Feb. 6—a happy outcome for a work that isn’t produced often in the United States. I managed to catch the show the other day, and found it witty, atmospheric and
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Here's something you don't encounter too often in the professional American theater: a full production of a play by G.K. Chesterton. In the nation's capital, the well-regarded Washington Stage Guild is plunging into 2011 with a staging of Chesterton's "Magic," a comedy-of-ideas about an
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As the 2010-2011 theater season revs up, audiences in the Washington, D.C., area can anticipate a newsworthy event: a production of “The Saint Plays” by Erik Ehn, an experimental dramatist whose elusive, poetic and sometimes hallucinatory plays are deeply informed by his Catholicism. Now the
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Feel safer in the era of security cameras and GPS technology? Think again. In this intriguing, readable article from Philosophy Now, scholar Emrys Westacott lays out an unnerving argument: "Ubiquitous surveillance is like a magnetic force that changes the trajectory of our moral aspiration.&
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I can’t claim to be a regular reader of Der Spiegel online, but I did stumble across this fascinating article on the uproar over the latest edition of the Passion Play, the stage extravaganza that has been staged in Oberammergau, Germany, every 10 years since the early 17th century. The play,
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It’s not often that you hear someone compare cutting-edge militaristic video games to Ovid, but Wired Magazine columnist Clive Thompson does exactly that in this fascinating conversation aired on NPR’s program On the Media (here’s the transcript). Thanks to the glories of podcasting, I just
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L.A. Theatre Works, a California company that presents, records, broadcasts and tours old-fashioned radio-theater productions of worthy plays, has just birthed a drama about Robert F. Kennedy and the evolution of his interest in civil rights. Titled “RFK: The Journey to Justice,” and written by
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An article in yesterday's Washington Post examined an apparent uptick in movies dealing with religion, "spirituality" and....all that kind of stuff. The reporter defines the motif rather broadly. Still, the article contains some interesting insights. (I particularly like the observation
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This interesting article from Biblical Archeology Review disputes the oft-cited hypothesis (see this pair of letters from readers in today’s Washington Post, for instance) that the early Christians selected Dec. 25 as the date for Christmas as a way of appropriating and eclipsing mid-winter pagan
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The remnants of Hurricane Ida are lashing the East Coast, where I live. The skies have been dark, and the rain pelting, for about 48 hours. And given the recent solemnity of Veterans Day, and all the frightening and depressing developments in the news, I would like to share a little welcome
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As a public radio addict, I am ashamed to say that I have long found one program unbearably tedious and mawkish: the essay series "This I Believe." I usually switch off the radio whenever I encounter it, but while driving on the D.C. beltway recently, I happened to hear the tail end of
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Those who didn’t make it all the way through Nelson D. Schwartz’s 2,700 word article on Lego in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Business section may have missed this gem of a factoid: Among the thousands of blogs and websites that cater to the toy brand’s grown-up fans is GodBricks, a
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A fascinating article by Michael Paulson, in the Boston Globe's Ideas section, discusses how religious scholars and writers have, over time, become increasingly enthusiastic about the oeuvre of J. K. Rowling. The Harry Potter books, religious studies professors and journalists now say, contain
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On Wednesday I was fortunate enough to conduct a phone interview with celebrated documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, the subject being his forthcoming series on America's National Parks (the six-part series starts airing on PBS on Sept. 27. ) He's hyper-articulate, and utterly impassioned about the
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It's good to see that the Emmy Award nominations, announced yesterday, once again recognized the quality of NBC's "30 Rock." This hilarious show has nabbed the best comedy Emmy for the past two years, and yesterday it scored big, landing the most-ever nominations (22) for a comedy series
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For those who just can’t get enough coverage of the Supreme Court, its members, and its potential members: The July/August issue of American Theatre, the national monthly magazine, contains an article by yours truly about several Supreme Court members participating in a D.C. theater company’s
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It may not merit top ranking on the woes-of-the-world list, but--as many other writers have noted--the continued implosion of the newspaper business is particularly threatening to traditional arts journalism. Papers have been laying off book and movie critics for several years. (I noticed today
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Don't you wish you could have been on hand when G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw traded verbal fisticuffs? Well you can, sort of, if you're in the D.C. area next Sunday, June 14. On that day, Washington Stage Guild, a theatre company that has often focused on Shaw, is reenacting a 1928
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