The Lunatic Is on the Air: A Stoppard Radio Play for Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' - NYTimes.com
MARCH 28, 2013, 8:51 AM The Lunatic Is on the Air: A Stoppard Radio Play for Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’
By DAVE ITZKOFF The 40th anniversary of the release of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” that best-selling Pink Floyd album, technically occurred earlier this month. But in the case of a seminal prog-rock record that deals with the nature of time (and the slowing-down thereof), we’ll forgive Tom Stoppard if his unique effort to celebrate this milestone doesn’t actually arrive until the summer.
Mr. Stoppard, the celebrated playwright of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “The Coast of Utopia” and a screenwriter of “Shakespeare in Love,” among many other works, has written a new play for British radio that will mark the 40 years since “The Dark Side of the Moon” was released in March 1973, The Guardian reported. But this latest dramatic work is no simple narrative of how Roger Waters, David Gilmour and company spent several months at Abbey Road recording songs like “Money,” “Time” and “Breathe.” This one’s … a little weird.
Describing Mr. Stoppard’s radio play, called “Dark Side,” at its Web site, the BBC called it “a fantastical and psychedelic story based on themes from the seminal album” that incorporates “music from the album and a gripping story that takes listeners on a journey through their imaginations.” (So keep your black-light posters handy, apparently.)
Mr. Stoppard, a self-identified Pink Floyd fan, said in a statement that he had spent the past four decades contemplating this project but had “no idea for a long time what I would do.”
“Finally,” he continued, “I found some time and sat down and listened to the album for the thousandth time and picked up from the beginning and kept going.”
The BBC said that the cast of “Dark Side” will feature actors like Bill Nighy, Rufus Sewell and Iwan Rheon but did not describe their roles. Mr. Gilmour of Pink Floyd said he had read Mr. Stoppard’s play and “found it fascinating.”
Mr. Stoppard’s “Dark Side” will be broadcast on BBC radio in August. There was no immediate announcement of an American air date or whether the play syncs up with “The Wizard of Oz.”
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/...n-the-air-a-stoppard-radio-play-for-pink-floyds-dark-side-of-the-moon/?pagewanted=print[3/29/2013 9:50:23 AM] Ancient Tragedy, Echoed by a Chorus of Veterans - The New York Times
March 28, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Ancient Tragedy, Echoed by a Chorus of Veterans
By JASON ZINOMAN
In modern productions of Greek tragedy, the chorus is often the Achilles’ heel.
Some directors seem unsure how to handle this ancient device, while others, like Desiree Sanchez, who staged the Aquila Theater’s “Herakles,” use it to embrace a high concept that ultimately hijacks the entire show.
In this tragedy by Euripides, the demigod Herakles (Brent Werzner), a mighty warrior and son of Zeus, returns from Hades, goes mad and murders his wife (Elizabeth Wakehouse) and children. The critic Jan Kott describes the bleak turn of events as a punishment from the gods. After all, Hades is supposed to be a place from which no man returns.
With a colloquial, economical translation by Peter Meineck, this production, which opened on Thursday night, aims for a dark, near nihilistic tone. It employs masks that are realistic enough to be slightly uncanny. In the moody lighting (by David Ferri), they almost look like faces reconstructed by plastic surgery. As Amphitryon, the husband of Herakles’ mother, Arthur Bartow delivers his weary speeches with a doomed grandeur.
But here the chorus has been replaced by video interludes of interviews with real-life veterans projected on a vast screen that dwarfs the actors. Talking straight to the camera, eloquent, glassy-eyed men and women tell harrowing stories of combat, including experiences in World War II, Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is gripping stuff, but it interrupts and often overwhelms the play. Mr. Werzner performs with a crude conviction, but his ferocity cannot match the quiet intensity and authenticity of the veterans’ recollections of actual battle and bloodshed. Mixing fiction and nonfiction can be an effective tool, but here these two elements clash more than complement.
Still, Aquila Theater, a veteran producer of classical plays, puts on a production that has an admirable clarity and even urgency. In picking which interviews to use, the show aims to demonstrate that some issues about war are timeless. Herakles’ descent into unthinkable violence is juxtaposed with veterans’ stories of violent images that they can’t shake. But even such echoes can come off as too neat and literal, taking mythic tragedy and transforming it into a drama about post-traumatic stress disorder.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/theater/reviews/herakles-from-aquila-theater-at-bam-fisher.html?pagewanted=print[3/29/2013 9:49:56 AM] Fay Kanin, 95, Writer for Movies and TV - NYTimes.com
March 28, 2013 Fay Kanin, Writer for Film and Stage, Dies at 95 By ALJEAN HARMETZ Fay Kanin, half of the husband-and-wife team that wrote the Clark Gable-Doris Day comedy “Teacher’s Pet” and the writer of television movies including Emmy-winning vehicles for Maureen Stapleton and Carol Burnett, died on Wednesday at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 95.
Her death was announced by the Writers Guild of America, West.
In 1979 Ms. Kanin, who was a playwright as well as a screenwriter, became just the second female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the advocacy organization that presents the Oscars. The first was Bette Davis, who resigned after two months in 1941.
Ms. Kanin was known for telling stories with a distinctly female perspective. Her play “Goodbye, My Fancy” was a comedy about a congresswoman and her misguided impulse to rekindle a college romance with a man who had since become the college president. It opened on Broadway in 1948, ran for more than a year and was later made into a movie with Joan Crawford.
“I’m a big feminist,” Ms. Kanin declared at the time. “I’ve put into my play my feeling that women should never back away from life.”
Ms. Kanin collaborated with her husband, Michael Kanin — the brother of Garson Kanin, who also wrote films with his wife, Ruth Gordon — on numerous screenplays, sometimes with other writers. They included “Sunday Punch” (1942), set in a boardinghouse for boxers, and “Rhapsody” (1954), about a young woman (Elizabeth Taylor) torn between two musicians.
For “Teacher’s Pet” (1958), a romantic comedy about a crabby and dismissive newspaper editor (Gable) and a spunky journalism teacher (Day), the Kanins were nominated for an Academy Award. They also wrote a stage play, “Rashomon,” adapted from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short stories and Akira Kurosawa’s film; the 1959 Broadway production starred Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger and was later adapted as a western film called “The Outrage,” with a cast including Ms. Bloom, Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.
But Ms. Kanin grew disenchanted with the film industry, feeling it had become less hospitable to the relationship dramas that intrigued her. As her husband withdrew from the writing partnership, she turned to television.
She won her first Emmy in 1974, for the movie “Tell Me Where It Hurts,” starring Ms. Stapleton as a housewife who realizes there is more to life than cooking and cleaning for a husband. A year later she was
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/fay-kanin-95-writer-for-movies-and-tv.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[3/29/2013 10:40:35 AM] Fay Kanin, 95, Writer for Movies and TV - NYTimes.com
nominated for an Emmy and won a Writers Guild Award for the television movie “Hustling” (1975), a raw look at prostitution in Manhattan. It set a Saturday night ratings record for ABC, drawing some 50 million viewers.
“I was hooked on the chance to deal with a subject usually presented to the public in a romantic haze of myth,” Ms. Kanin said. She did six months of research, which included waiting with prostitutes in police station bullpens.
In 1979 Ms. Kanin wrote and co-produced the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning film “Friendly Fire.” Based on a book by C. D. B. Bryan that originally appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker, it is about a conservative Iowa farm couple, Gene and Peg Mullen (played by Ned Beatty and Ms. Burnett) who become activists against the Vietnam War after their son is killed by fire from his own troops.
One reason she chose to do the movie, Ms. Kanin said, was the death of her own son, Joel, at 13 from leukemia in 1958. “I had all the angers Peg had, many of them misdirected,” she said. “I was angry at the doctors like Peg was angry at the Army.”
Thirty-four years ago Ms. Kanin was elected president of the Motion Picture Academy by a board that consisted of 34 men and one other woman. Although the gender ratio has changed since then — there are 19 women on the Academy’s current 57-member board of governors — Ms. Kanin was the last woman to serve as president. In her four one-year terms, the maximum allowed, she was widely credited with pushing the Academy to help preserve Hollywood films.
Fay Mitchell was born in New York on May 9, 1917, the only child of a clothing store manager and a retired vaudeville actress.
After she graduated from the University of Southern California at 19, Ms. Kanin, who already had screenwriting ambitions, was hired by RKO Pictures as a script reader.
It was there that she met Mr. Kanin, a writer who would go on to win an Oscar with Ring Lardner Jr. for their screenplay for “Woman of the Year” (1942), the first of the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn films. They married in 1940; he died in 1993. Ms. Kanin’s survivors include her son Josh; two granddaughters; two stepgrandsons; and a great-grandson.
In a speech in 2003 Ms. Kanin recalled her start as a playwright. Her brother-in-law Garson Kanin had brought the script of “Goodbye, My Fancy” to a major producer, Max Gordon, who said he loved it, but lamented that he could produce only one more play that season and had on his desk a comedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, who had written the classic comedies “Dinner at 8” and “Stage Door.” “Now, if you were Max Gordon, which play would you do?” he asked Ms. Kanin, who reluctantly gave him the answer he wanted.
“I’ll be the producer,” Michael Kanin told his wife, and he then mortgaged their house to raise the money.
The Kaufman-Ferber comedy disappeared almost immediately, while “Goodbye, My Fancy” became a hit. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/fay-kanin-95-writer-for-movies-and-tv.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[3/29/2013 10:40:35 AM] Fay Kanin, 95, Writer for Movies and TV - NYTimes.com
The next time she met Mr. Gordon, Ms. Kanin said, he looked at her sadly.
“Why did you give me such lousy advice?” he asked.
Bruce Weber contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/fay-kanin-95-writer-for-movies-and-tv.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[3/29/2013 10:40:35 AM]