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3) Othello
Language
English
Description
John Kani's Othello is a fine and masterful performance that should make every white actor think twice before blacking up for the Moor, wrote The Guardian of this raw and powerful interpretation of the play. The production marked the first time an African actor had been cast in the title role opposite a white Desdemona before a multiracial audience in Johannesburg, South Africa. With Tony Award winner John Kani as Othello, Joanna Weinberg as Desdemona,...
Language
Español
Description
Jacinto Benavente-a member of the Generation of '98, the winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Literature, and one of the most influential Spanish dramatists of the entire 20th century-penned more than 170 plays. This program tells the story of Benavente's life and the turbulent times in which he lived as it sheds light on aspects of his writing. A critic of the bourgeois class, he nonetheless counted its members among his most loyal supporters. Readings...
Language
English
Description
Ridiculed by some, admired by others, and ignored by no one, Yukio Mishima has remained a paradox in both life and death. This program combines extensive archival footage of Mishima; interviews with colleagues, including his biographer, Henry Scott Stokes, and two of his translators; and readings by actor John Hurt to portray Japan's immensely popular novelist, playwright, actor, and patriot of the extreme right. Obsessed with the act of hara-kiri...
Language
Español
Description
After the death of Franco and during the transition to a parliamentary monarchy, Spain's cultural life blossomed once again. In this environment, the poetry movement known as "the other sentimentality"-named after the first book of Javier Egea and Luis Garcia Montero-was born, a movement known for its transformation of the personal experience into a collective one so that any reader might identify with the feelings evoked. This program discusses that...
Language
English
Description
Viewed by many as the preeminent dramatist of our time, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter was also an accomplished actor, steeped in the relationship between text and performance. In this program, produced two years prior to his death, he advises a group of actors as they conduct staged readings of scenes from his plays. In addition, Pinter grants a candid and detailed interview, accompanied by his friend and longtime collaborator, director Henry Woolf....
Language
English
Description
Effortlessly making the leap from stage to cinema, the plays of William Shakespeare have enjoyed decades of popularity in theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. This program combines clips from significant movie productions with an eclectic group of interviews to demonstrate the Bard's uncanny ability to fire the modern imagination-especially through the medium of film. Excerpts from Julie Taymor's Titus and Kenneth Branagh's musical Love's Labour's...
Language
Español
Description
The life and work of Pablo Neruda-Nobel Laureate, statesman, renowned poet-both reflect and embody the events that shaped the 20th century. Born in Chile, he fled as a political refugee in 1948, not to return until 1952. Through archival material, Neruda's writings, and interviews with family, friends, and scholars, this program presents Neruda's life and the times that molded it.
Language
English
Description
The first appearance of the Don Juan legend in literary form was in Tirso's El Burlador de Sevilla. Moliere's Dom Juan, da Ponte's libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni, and the "Don Juan in Hell" scene in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman are the other most famous versions, with the notable addition of Zorrilla's play. It was the most successful play of the nineteenth century in Spain. The reason is made obvious by this stylish, lavish, and captivating...
Language
English
Description
Attention must be paid to this abbreviated but superb 1966 television adaptation by Arthur Miller of his Pulitzer Prize - winning modern tragedy - starring the incomparable Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, re-creating their original Broadway roles as the Lomans. In a career-defining performance, Cobb portrays the suffering Willy Loman - the middle-aged man at the end of his emotional rope - with Dunnock equally impressive as his patient wife, Linda....
Language
English
Description
A distinguished senior member of the Generation of '98 and Rector of Salamanca University, Miguel de Unamuno considered himself an "ideoclast": someone who breaks in ideas like boots, making them his own by wearing and using them. This program combines documentary material and dramatizations to present the story of a multitalented Spanish philosopher, essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright against the backdrop of his turbulent times.
Language
English
Description
Renowned restaurateur Duncan Docherty has built a gastronomic empire, but his sous-chef and maitre d' are cooking up treachery. In this modern retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy, screenwriter Peter Moffat sets the action in a 3-star London restaurant with a kitchen full of flashing blades and bloody business. James McAvoy plays Joe Macbeth, revered by his staff and relied on by Duncan-even to groom his son, Malcolm, to take over the operation. Keeley...
Language
English
Description
A suppressor of his own writings, Franz Kafka even requested that upon his death all his extant works be destroyed-yet those very works accurately prefigured the anxieties and alienation so commonly associated with the latter part of the 20th century. This program delves into Kafka's fictional world, primarily through a gripping dramatization of The Trial, a combination of simple tale and complex parable describing Joseph K.'s bizarre arrest and execution....
Language
Français
Description
Based loosely upon the events following the death of the Roman emperor Vespasian in the 1st century, Bérénice is the story of a love triangle in which Emperor Titus and his friend Antiochus, King of Commagene, both fall in love with the Queen of Judea: Bérénice. This production by the incomparable La Comédie-Française dramatically captures the anguish and the intensity of Racine’s play—a play that marked both the young playwright’s ascendancy...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
1921, Chicago. Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the "wealthiest Negro in America," whose affluence catapulted his family to the heights of Black society. After the unexpected death of her only brother, Nelly becomes the premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage. For the past year, she has worked undercover as an investigative journalist, sharing the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people...
Language
English
Description
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Performed at Shakespeare's Globe, London's faithful reconstruction of the open-air playhouse designed in 1599, Romeo and Juliet is arguably the best-loved of all love stories in Western literature. The play's masterful combination of lyricism, suspense, and dramatic changes of mood is dramatized by an energetic cast that stars Adetomiwa Edun-called "a Romeo...
Language
English
Description
Called "the greatest Hamlet of his generation" by Guardian reviewer Robert McCrum, Scottish actor David Tennant headlines this edgy film version of the acclaimed 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company stage production. Tennant is supported by a host of gifted players-including the impeccable Patrick Stewart as Claudius and Oliver Ford Davies in an astonishing performance as a doddering yet strangely leonine Polonius. Modern costumes, shrewd textual abridgements,...