Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:59:10 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Laura Collins-Hughes :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Laura+Collins-Hughes istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/lost-boy-roberto-aguirre-sacasas-king-of-shadows/85312/ Mon, 8 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The risk of a playwright's note in a program — that little message penned directly to the audience, no actors or script to get in the way as the writer imparts some context for what the spectators are about to see — is that it can come across as a disclaimer. In the case of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's note outlining the genesis of his "King of Shadows," which is making its world premiere in a Working Theater production at Theater for the New City, the seeming disclaimer goes something like this... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/drowning-in-the-desert-miriam-toewss-the-flying/86743/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST There's something inherently appealing about a novel that makes Deborah Solomon, the New York Times Magazine Q&A guru, the crush object of a 15-year-old Canadian boy. "What do you like so much about Deborah Solomon?" Logan Troutman's cool, 28-year-old aunt, Hattie, asks him, having spied the plea, "Deborah Solomon, be my girlfriend," written in the coating of dust on the family TV. "The older woman thing?" Hattie guesses. That isn't it, turns out. "She's solid," Logan says after some prodding... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/her-so-called-life-sarah-shun-lien-bynums-ms/85786/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The black-and-white subway ads for the NYC Teaching Fellows program were, if you recall, heavy-handed, even a little bit cruel. Also, frankly, not as well punctuated as they might have been. "You remember your first grade teacher's name. Who will remember yours?" they asked, taunting vulnerable commuters with the anonymous worthlessness of their pursuits. Even so, there was a kind of genius to them, because don't most of us remember our earliest teachers? Not just first grade, but all the way... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-walk-in-the-woods-craig-wrights-lady/85393/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST No good can come to a dog in a hunting play, especially if the play is named after the dog. This much is obvious in the first seconds of Craig Wright's provocative and nuanced dark comedy "Lady," when headlights illuminate the blackness of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and the young dog runs off. "Lady, heel!" Kenny (Michael Shannon) yells, to no avail. It's 5 a.m. in the fogbound woods somewhere in the middle of Illinois, and there's no way the day is going to end well for Kenny and his dog... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/navel-gazing-emily-perkinss-novel-about-my-wife/85311/ Mon, 8 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST We don't see each other clearly, no matter how close we get, no matter how seemingly intimate we are. Sometimes, in the most egregious cases, that's because we're standing in our own way. Even hindsight is little help to Tom Stone, the 40-something Londoner who unspools the narrative of Emily Perkins's poignant, unsettling, and darkly funny "Novel About My Wife" (Bloomsbury USA, 271 pages, $14.99). Ostensibly, the story he tells is about his wife, Ann, who's died, though we don't know how. "If... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-bookish-girl-meets-party-boy-curtis/84486/ Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST At the game of imagining strangers' lives, Curtis Sittenfeld excels. It's easy to envision her seated on a park bench or in a café, people-watching and making up stories to fit the faces in the crowd. Key questions in the game when the strangers are a couple: Why is she with him? Why is he with her? As a nation of voyeurs for whom the salaciously personal frequently eclipses the political, we ask ourselves those same questions about the people we elect to office — most frequently after a sex... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-self-inflicted-death-joan-wickershams/84039/ Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The before and the after are stark. Before, you don't think suicide has anything to do with you. After, you know it does — undeniably, irreversibly. The membrane separating those two states is whisper-thin. Whether you cross it is not at all up to you. Joan Wickersham entered the after on a February morning in 1991, when her 61-year-old father, Paul, got dressed, retrieved the newspaper from the end of the driveway, made his wife a pot of coffee, and brought a cup upstairs to her while she... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/young-single-in-beijing-twenty-fragments-of/83569/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST A young Chinese woman's voracious yearning for the West is what comes through most clearly in Xiaolu Guo's "Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 167 pages, $21.95), a slender book that bears the hallmarks of so many first novels: tentativeness, clumsiness, transparent autobiography. It was Ms. Guo's first novel published in China, and unearthing it now — after her success with "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers," short-listed for the Orange Prize last... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/calendar/a-window-view-of-parrots-and-peril/83127/ Mon, 4 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Quite a few things go out the window in "The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III" (Random House, 242 pages, $22), but you will find no spoiler here telling whether Bob T. Hash III is, as the novel's title suggests, one of them. This sly and discombobulating flight of whimsy by David Deans is, in a sense, a book-length joke, and nothing drains the humor from a good joke as effectively as vivisecting it. Detailing Mr. Deans's plot, too, is risky. He has set this persistently funny metafiction... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/mostly-martha-philip-galaness-emmas-table/82694/ Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The woman's face is obscured, cut off just below the nose, but the imperiousness of her expression is clear enough from the firm set of her mouth, her lips painted Joker red. Clad in a tailored scarlet coat, she wears outsize pearls at her throat and on her earlobes, a glittering rock on her right hand. In her arms is a pink-collared lapdog, all pampered perfection. This artful creature, who adorns the crimson cover of "Emma's Table" (Harper, 288 pages, $23.95), might be mistaken for the late... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-missing-years-sam-taylors-the-amnesiac/82250/ Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST "Do you remember where you were when you heard that Princess Diana was dead?" It's a little bit absurd as a marker of national trauma, and it flusters the American mind, and yet, on its face, the question is the perfect test of memory for any sentient Briton past childhood. James Purdew, the lost young man at the center of Sam Taylor's existential, metafictional detective novel, "The Amnesiac" (Penguin Books, 384 pages, $14), can answer that question in detail when a doctor poses it. What he... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/reduced-shakespeare-jess-winfields-my-name-is-will/81766/ Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The syndicated sex-advice columnist Dan Savage has a rule — one among many he's compiled in his years in the business — for identifying bogus questions that show up in his mailbox. It's one that novelists would be smart to note. It boils down to this: If the prose reads as if it were a letter to Penthouse, the writer is lying, and lying badly. Jess Winfield, in his comic novel, "My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare" (Twelve, 291 pages, $23.99), writes sex scenes that Mr... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/standing-up-from-the-ghetto-don-reeds-east-14th/81767/ Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Jackie Mason is all the reminder anyone needs of the long tradition of putting stand-up comedy on the theatrical stage and calling it theater. But stand-up comedy by any other name is still stand-up, and that is what Don Reed performs in his autobiographical one-man show, "East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player," at New World Stages, the theater complex where Mr. Mason's latest show is running just down the hall. Mr. Reed, who wrote and directs "East 14th," has assembled his narrative from... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/out-of-the-chrysalis-poppy-adamss-the-sister/81278/ Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Memory makes unreliable witnesses of us all, but knowing that usually doesn't change the way we operate. What are we to trust as we move through the world if not our firsthand perceptions, so intrinsic to the cartography of our lives? If our own recollections are false, if our understanding of pivotal events proves to be misunderstanding, where are we then? And, by the way, what time is it? Time slips in and out of an uncertain present shadowed by the distant past in Poppy Adams's "The Sister"... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/scenes-from-a-mall-catherine-oflynns-what-was-lost/80908/ Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST In the children's classic, "The Velveteen Rabbit," it's a child who makes a toy real. But in stories for grown-ups, the truth is the reverse: It's the toy that makes the child real. With its intimations of sweetness and vulnerability, of an imagination unfettered, a toy beloved of a young character in a book (or a movie, or a play) instantly imbues that child with poignancy. In Catherine O'Flynn's "What Was Lost" (Holt Paperbacks, 246 pages, $14), the toy in question is a small stuffed monkey... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/finding-drama-between-the-covers/80456/ Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST It's unavoidable. Every time I see a production of "Hamlet," or read the play, there comes a moment when I think of Bette Midler. I mentioned this to my sister-in-law, an English professor, over dinner the other night, thinking it would be a common experience among people who partook of pop culture in the '80s. Turns out I was mistaken. "I'm so sorry," she said condolingly. And then I had to explain: It's because of "Outrageous Fortune," Ms. Midler's 1987 movie with Shelley Long, which... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/decline-and-fall-julie-hechts-happy-trails-to-you/80014/ Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST She's kind of a nut job, the narrator of Julie Hecht's collection of short stories, "Happy Trails to You" (Simon & Schuster, 209 pages, $24), but she definitely has a point about Paul McCartney's hair. Even those of us who haven't set up a Paul McCartney Google Alert, as she has, noticed, if we were paying any attention at all, when he abandoned aging gracefully in favor of coloring his salt-and-pepper hair. "Paul McCartney has problems with dark brown," she opines in "Thank You for the... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-dazzling-finish-to-ests-marathon/79621/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Whimsy is the top note in the last of the three series that make up Ensemble Studio Theatre's 2008 marathon of one-act plays, an installment that feels somewhat less firmly anchored than the first two but finishes with a soft, exquisite dazzle. The program begins with Frank D. Gilroy's sitcom-ish "Piscary," in which a guy (Mark Alhadeff), mere weeks before his wedding, dumps his fiancée (Diane Davis) on grounds of intellectual incompatibility. Based on his 57-13 record of Scrabble victories... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/flights-of-angels/79542/ Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The publication date is a misfire, but it's understandable. Common sense would dictate that a new novel from one of America's most esteemed playwrights, whose best-known work is resolutely masculine, ought to come out just ahead of Father's Day, alongside the titles on war and golf and the underworld. But David Rabe's "Dinosaurs on the Roof" (Simon & Schuster, 484 pages, $26) is, it turns out, a month overdue. A story of mothers and daughters and the Rapture, it is a Father's Day book only if... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/neil-labute-finds-reasons-to-be-nice/79132/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Neil LaBute has spent his career in the company of men, and generally these have not been nice men. The guys who have made their way out of Mr. LaBute's imagination, onto the page, then onto the stage or the screen, have not tended to be the sort that another guy would want his sister or daughter to end up with. These men have been creeps, mostly. Lowlifes, lots of them: physically violent, nasty, unfaithful, bigoted, vaguely criminal, cowardly, homophobic, shallow, reflexively dishonest... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/grace-is-gone-a-mothers-memoir-of-grief/79046/ Mon, 2 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Here is one detail about a quirky, blond, 5-year-old girl who died: "She carried hard dried salami in a small pink and white gingham purse." Here are others: She wore glasses and glittery red shoes. She carried a leopard-print backpack. She loved making art and listening to the Beatles, and she luxuriated in sleep in a way her gentle big brother, Sam, never could. Two days before she died, she picked purple myrtle and green chives in the backyard and made her mom a bouquet. A fiction writer... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/est-marathon-a-grab-bag-with-a-boldface-anchor/79029/ Mon, 2 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Ensemble Studio Theatre's 2008 marathon of one-act plays isn't a trilogy, of course; no single theme unites the grab bag of works on any of its three programs, let alone in the festival as a whole. But as in many a trilogy, the second of the three parts shows signs of weakness. Series B of the marathon involves rather a lot of slogging between moments of fierce engagement — and in this case, the ferociously pitched battle that is the high point arrives in the middle. That apex comes courtesy of... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/dungeons-dragons-nerds/76622/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Once upon a time, back in the dark days of nerdiness, it was not possible to buy a mass-produced T-shirt emblazoned with the directive, "Talk nerdy to me." Back then, paperbacks that hit the market under the banner "The Nerd Series" would have been a tough sell even among romance-novel readers, a deeply nerdy segment of the population. But these are good times for the nerd, at least for the grown-up variety. The T-shirt is on Amazon.com, and the nerd romances have hit the best-seller lists. Now... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/short-slices-of-life/76624/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 EST A lineup of short plays demands the balance and momentum of a musician's set list. Segues have to be smooth, breaks need to feel natural, the peak shouldn't come too soon, and, of course, every piece on the list has to be good: no duds. In series A of its 30th annual marathon of one-act plays, the first of three programs in the festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre gets all of that just right. An upright piano plays as the lights go up on Willie Reale and Patrick Barnes's three-song musical, "A... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/translations-and-mistranslations-in-damascus/76477/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EST People have a habit of talking past one another in David Greig's plays. Willfully or with the best of intentions, they mishear and fail to hear each other; they misunderstand and fail to know each other. The longings of the human soul, laid bare for acknowledgment, go unnoticed or ignored. In "Damascus," a heart-bruising comedy that is the Scottish playwright's second entry in this year's Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Mr. Greig's subject is the failure of entire regions of the... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/idi-amin-is-hogging-the-couch/75907/ Tue, 6 May 2008 00:12:48 EST As he slouches into middle age, cigarette and drink in hand, Steve has just been dumped via e-mail by his boyfriend of eight years. His playwriting career is a dying echo of what it once was, and his Brooklyn apartment looks like he stopped decorating sometime in the mid-'90s. Depressed, intensely lonely, creatively and romantically desperate, Steve has approximately one thing going for him: a drop-dead view of the Manhattan Bridge out his living room window. Until, that is, Idi Amin bursts... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/yellow-moon-boy-meets-girl-and-soon-theyre-on/75656/ Thu, 1 May 2008 01:29:41 EST Stag Lee Macalinden is 17 and a lowlife in training: a sullen petty thief, a source of pain to his depressive single mum. His schoolmate, Leila Suleiman, a quiet, college-bound daughter of immigrants, secretly cuts herself with razor blades. In "Yellow Moon (The Ballad of Leila and Lee)," by the prolific Scottish playwright David Greig, the two meet not at all cute one January night at the local superstore, when Lee (Andrew Scott-Ramsay) unzips his fly and leers at Leila (Nalini Chetty). She... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/cant-fight-carnegie-hall/60064/ Wed, 8 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST The tenants of the Carnegie Hall Studio Towers — some of whom filed a lawsuit on Thursday to prevent their eviction — can't seem to help it. Like a freshly jilted spouse, they slip into the firstperson plural when talking about Carnegie Hall, even though its management is trying to clear them out to gain space for education programs. After decades of living and working upstairs from the concert hall, the tenants refer to Carnegie as "we," not "they." One evening last week, more than two dozen... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/trading-in-suspects-secrets-and-lies/59894/ Mon, 6 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Is it fair to blame one production for another's critical shortcoming? Possibly not, but it's worth wondering whether "Masked," at the DR2 Theatre, will slow its breakneck pace after "The/King/Operetta" ends its run Saturday at the Barrow Street Theatre. Actor Arian Moayed, who plays Lyndon Johnson in "The/King/Operetta," also plays one of three Palestinian brothers in "Masked," a 1990 drama by Israeli playwright Ilan Hatsor that does not feel dated at all. So when "The/King/Operetta"closes, Mr... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/first-time-for-everything/59900/ Mon, 6 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST "My First Time," at New World Stages, is "inspired" by the Web site MyFirstTime.com, on which people post what are ostensibly tales of their first sexual experiences. Produced and directed by Ken Davenport, the show is a series of monologues and one-liners written by Mr. Davenport and, as the Playbill puts it, "Real People Just Like You." If, that is, you're the type to write about your sex life, or your fantasies, online. Cobbled together from entries on the site, "My First Time" means to be... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/upstairs-downstairs-at-carnegie-hall/59565/ Wed, 1 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST It's art versus art at Carnegie Hall. In May, the venue's leadership announced that the leases of tenants in the adjoining Studio Towers would not be renewed. Now it has moved aggressively to empty the more than 50 units situated above the concert halls, beginning eviction proceedings in July. But the tenants, many of whom have lived and worked there for decades, are putting up a legal fight and will air their concerns to local politicians at a meeting in the studios this evening. The battle is... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/romeo-and-juliet-all-over/59055/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST It has been a big season for Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers. With Kenneth MacMillan's staging at American Ballet Theater, Peter Martins' staging at the New York City Ballet (where it is scheduled to return this winter), and Michael Greif's production at Shakespeare in the Park, "Romeo and Juliet" has received more than its fair share of attention in New York this summer. So is there room for one more? According to the Classical Theater of Harlem, yes. This week, the company begins a second... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/voice-apart-for-richard/58933/ Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST There's a curiously counterproductive dynamic at work in "Richard III" at Nicu's Spoon. In this production, two actors share the role of Shakespeare's murderous king: One of them, Henry Holden, stands on a leg brace and crutches at the center of the action, largely mute, as a younger man, Andrew Hutcheson, speaks Richard's lines from behind a music stand in the corner. The text being paramount in Shakespeare, at least in English-language productions, the audience's attention is irresistibly... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/this-vision-of-war-doesnt-translate/56975/ Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST It's dinnertime in a war zone, and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" crackles over the radio. A family, upstage around a brightly lit kitchen table, drinks bouillon as a lost son, alone and far away, buries his head in his arms in the dimness downstage. Slowly, all but the lost one begin singing along with Simon and Garfunkel, and a sense of warmth and safety buoys the scene nearly into a full-fledged musical number. The feeling lasts only seconds before it's obliterated, but its sweet, comic... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/medium-is-the-text-message/45316/ Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Martha Clarke made her way down the house wall at New York Theatre Workshop a few weeks ago, headed for the pool of light at the edge of the stage to tell the audience why the show was about to halt: The computer running the English surtitles for her Italian-language theater piece, "Kaos," had frozen. But before she could stop the performance, the machine started again, the emergency passed, and Ms. Clarke retreated back into the darkness. It was the sort of trouble that Ms. Clarke, a veteran... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/affectionate-in-joke/44921/ Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Theatrical believers so exuberant that they could raise Tinker Bell from the dead unassisted, Bud and Doug of "Gutenberg! The Musical!" have written a new show they hope will be Broadway bound — as soon as they're done giving their two-man performance of it for the big producers in the audience. What's that? Your cliché detector is beeping? Turn it off for a minute. "Gutenberg! The Musical!" is a fictional take on Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of the printing press and publisher... LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES http://www.nysun.com/arts/knockin-on-broadways-door/42104/ Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST On Broadway, where familiarity is a strong lure for both producers and ticket-buyers, two factors tend to spell safety for a new show: a huge celebrity name and a creator whose track record includes a big, fat, recent Broadway hit. So the Bob Dylan-Twyla Tharp collaboration, "The Times They Are A-Changin'," which opens Thursday, would appear to have nothing to worry about. After all, Ms. Tharp's 2002 Billy Joel musical, "Movin' Out," was showered with critical raves, won Ms. Tharp her first...