Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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Culture Still Fighting the Good Fight
As I was leaving the Public Theater at the conclusion of Tony Kushner’s new, four-hour play, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures,” I ran into an old friend — a notable writer and social activist, a rabble-rouser of sorts who’d spent her entire adult life street fighting,…
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Culture With Too Much Information, the Truth Is Sometimes Hard To Watch
If you’re looking for a balanced review of The New Group’s remounting of Wallace Shawn’s 1979 play “Marie and Bruce,” you might as well stop reading now. I’m just going to fail you. When it comes to the plays of Shawn, I’m not capable of even feigning objectivity. Everything I admire in the theater, everything…
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Culture It’s a Bug’s Life
“Metamorphosis,” the new play that was recently on view at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of BAM’s annual Next Wave Festival, belongs to a particularly well-armed strain of contemporary theater. Self-consciously serious, these shows more often than not originate in countries that have deep wells of arts funding, and so they tour for…
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Culture Earthbound Angels
As part of a season devoted to Tony Kushner’s work, Signature Theater Company has daringly chosen to remount the epic masterpiece “Angels in America” for the first time since its Broadway run in 1993, providing an opportunity to look at the play anew, this time with an eye toward how it holds up outside of…
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Culture The Problem With Liberals
There was a time, in the 1980s and early ’90s, when kitchen-sink realism was so ubiquitous that it seemed this was the only “correct” way to write a play. You place your usually working-class characters around the dining room table, or maybe the living room couch, and let them talk at each other, slowly unveiling…
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Culture Anti-Semitism 101
The conceit of Randy Cohen’s new play, “The Punishing Blow,” requires a bit of setup. At some point in the past, second-rate college professor Leslie (Seth Duerr) was arrested for what amounts to an overblown case of public drunkenness — specifically, ramming his car into a ginkgo tree and then waking the neighborhood with his…
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The Schmooze Randy Cohen on Mel Gibson, ‘The Gift That Keeps on Giving’
Randy Cohen didn’t set out to lampoon Mel Gibson. But the concept behind his one man play “The Punishing Blow,” which opens August 13 starring Seth Duerr, might lead one to believe that he did. It’s the story of a bile-filled college professor, prone to incendiary Jew-baiting remarks who, arrested for drunk driving, is forced…
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Culture Ways To Case the Literati
1. A writer — intelligent, disciplined, not without talent — watches as shysters and hucksters game the literary world, writing fake memoirs, peddling fake personal tragedies. He has mixed feelings about their success. It’s not his, which grates, and they often have more chutzpah than literary ability, which infuriates. But also, he admires their bold…
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