Woyzeck
An excellent production of one of world literature’s most provocative plays, Thomas Whitaker’s Woyzeck is great both as theater and as food for thought about drama’s most enduring yet volatile genre, the tragedy.
Author: Charles Donelan
B¼chner’s Woyzeck at UCSB
Few plays have as tangled a history as Woyzeck, the acclaimed Late Romantic masterpiece by tragically short-lived playwright and agitator Georg B¼chner. B¼chner packed about as much literature, philosophy, and risk-taking into his 23 years as it is possible to imagine. And Woyzeck is the distillation of his precocious genius, a play that anticipates Brecht and Marx by decades while fulfilling the German Romantic quest for a drama to rival Shakespeare’s force, tension, and propulsion.
The God of Hell
Perhaps it takes a playwright who reached his creative peak in the Reagan era to understand the darker aspects of our current Republican nightmare, but fortunately for us, Sam Shepard is back on form and Genesis West has got him.
R. B. Kitaj 1932-2007
Ronald Brooks “R. B.” Kitaj died in Los Angeles on October 21. An American artist who spent most of his adult life in London, Kitaj was among the most ambitious figurative painters of the late 20th century. Associated for a short time with the emergence of pop art in Britain, Kitaj had the distinction of naming his own movement, the “School of London,” which included such illustrious neighbors as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, David Hockney, Michael Andrews, and Lucian Freud.
David Lindley with Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan
David Lindley is a great guitarist who deserves the kind of recognition that his good friend Ry Cooder has lately garnered, and if he keeps making the kind of music that he made at the Lobero on Saturday night, it won’t be long before he gets it.
A Benefit for Heather Mattoon on November 11
This story begins in so many places: Cape Cod and Santa Barbara, but also the imagination, and the art world, and wherever there are true gatherings of real friends. Heather Mattoon needs a benefit now because she is confined to a wheelchair, and is trying to put together a new life without any health insurance. She fell from a window at the end of the summer and severed her spine.
Modern Dance Company Pilobolus Restructures
Named for a sun-loving variety of fungus and founded as a collective at Dartmouth College in 1971, Pilobolus Dance Theatre has developed a distinctively gymnastic style of movement involving complex, multi-Â-dancer lifts that are sometimes used to create the shadows of larger single forms.
The God of Hell at Center Stage Theater
Genesis West opens Sam Shepard’s apocalyptic post-9/11 farce this weekend, and you can expect fireworks-or at the very least, long, arcing electric sparks emanating from Haynes, a representative of a secret U.S. agency who is on the lam after being exposed to radiation.
1957
The point of departure for this varied and stimulating exhibition is the year 1957, a watershed in American history and culture. Gathering paintings and objects from far and wide, exhibition curator Jeremy Tessmer demonstrates a discerning eye; there is more than historical coincidence at work in his selection.
Camerata Pacifica
The woodwinds got their turn in the limelight at Friday night’s concert, which featured four pieces, including three works written for large ensembles that included multiple oboes, bassoons, and clarinets. The ebulliently sardonic John Steinmetz led both the reeds and the Adrian Spence jeering section with customary aplomb.
