Follow the Dum Dums; eat one if you dare. Last Thursday night, a line of the whimsical lollipops snaked its way up the stairs and into the second floor gallery of Artspace. The candy served as an introduction to Gluttony, Michael Quattlebaum’s first installation piece. An immensely talented and committed artist associated with Paint In […]
Maria Pramaggiore
Posted inFilm & Television
The Cho-sen One
According to promotional materials, Margaret Cho’s new concert film NotoriousC.H.O. pays homage to “the hot ladies of rap music, particularly their lustful and bawdy expressions of strength and sexuality.” But the connection is a dubious one. Cho never uses terms like “hot ladies” unless she’s disparaging straight porn or celebrating the drag queens who raised […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Body Politics
Let’s face it: Sex makes Americans squeamish, especially when it’s detached from love and marriage. In fact, that squeamishness may be a defining characteristic of contemporary American culture. A case in point might be Hollywood’s recent treatment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s long-suffering Puritan pariah, Hester Prynne. In Roland Joffe’s 1995 adaptation of Hawthorne’s parable, the director […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Fixer-Upper
For a while now I’ve had this idea that David Fincher is the unthinking person’s David Cronenberg. Fincher’s work with longtime Cronenberg collaborator and Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore on Seven and The Game nurtured this suspicion. His current film, Panic Room, only confirms it. When Seven came out, I went to a late-night screening […]
Posted inArt
Getting Heavy
The best of Triangle theater during 2001 consisted of challenging works whose creative staging rendered bold, political themes all the more compelling. Often drawing from experimental theater practices, these performances were not designed for the faint of heart, but rather for audiences willing to engage with what a growing number of local theater companies do […]
Posted inArt
Setting the Record Straight
Despite the successful resurrection of the American flag to reify an imaginary national consensus, accompanied by the anti-secular stylings of so many “God Bless Americas,” words still matter and symbols still have meaning, even in politics. Especially when those words and symbols have two meanings. Take, for example, the controversial redeployment of words originally meant […]
Posted inArt
Ties That Bind
Manbites Dog Theater describes its current offering, Nicky Silver’s Fit to Be Tied, as a “darkly hilarious holiday comedy.” In the two-act play–which focuses on the antics of three characters who inhabit, during Thanksgiving and New Year’s, the New York apartment of Arloc (Mark Filiaci), a youngish, gay Richie Rich–Silver sends up with maniacal zeal […]
Posted inArt
Testing Taboos
Last Thursday’s one-time performance of Paperdoll Psychology at Artspace raises several questions about the relationship between art and politics, a subject that fascinates me. Surveying the 2001-02 Triangle theater season, I sense that I am not alone in that fascination. Amid the growing popularity of works like Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues–and, importantly, the Monologues’ migration […]
Posted inArt
Play Tectonics
A nameless woman confesses a crime of both passion and premeditation in “Medea Redux,” the second monologue in Neil LaBute’s Bash: Latterday Plays, a trilogy of one-acts that opens the season for Raleigh Ensemble Players. The woman relates her story, struggling to remember a word she learned from her junior high school teacher, a man […]
Posted inArt
Processing “The Process”
The most unnerving passages in Joan Didion’s Political Fictions, the passages that come closest to replicating the skin-crawling paranoia of her 1983 book Salvador, appear in the foreword and in the final essay. Both address the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election that “came to be known as ‘Florida’.” In typical Didion fashion, the writing […]