Year: 2012

Radio

The Ghastly Impermanence: Sight Unseen

Giving Prof. Guralnick the benefit of fair doubt, I believe her goal in writing the book is to expand the audience for radio drama by proving its link to stage drama, to discuss playwrights who are best known for their stage work, rather than playwrights who write specifically for radio. I cannot argue against her choice of material. What I will argue is that the approach probably confirms more biases than it dispels.

by Omar Willey 20 November, 2012
Fiction

The Theme of Foreplay

The Author makes it home with his youngest, his only, daughter. It’s late, early in the afternoon but late for nap. He has been calling Lilly’s name in the car and poking her in the backseat to keep her awake so she wouldn’t take a fifteen-minute nap that replaced a two-hour nap. He has been minimally successful and does not know what will come of naptime. The final chapter on their morning excursion has yet to be written, though it is no longer morning.

by Nick Stokes 19 November, 2012
Radio

The Ghastly Impermanence: The Museum, The Department Store and The Landfill

Artists like Norman Corwin strove toward an idea of radio as an artist’s studio with radio drama as a natural product of the process. Yet as so often typical in American culture, singular artistic visions hardly merit a mention in histories of radio. The idea of an artist’s studio went largely ignored, because the goal of OTR was not to produce art but rather to produce consumers.

by Omar Willey 16 November, 2012
Theater

Landscape of the Body: The Limits of Pastiche

John Guare’s plays were po-mo before po-mo was the American theater’s default setting. They revel in pop culture references. They erase the line between reality and the phony “hyperreality” promoted every day in the media. His approach to the material is that so beloved of deconstructionists everywhere: pastiche. The difficulty in staging this pastiche is that the play often threatens to turn into pure chaos.

by Omar Willey 13 November, 2012