A Violent Life

Pier Paolo Pasolini, little known in America, is probably Italy's most important postwar intellectual. One reason for his relative obscurity in the States is his use of so many different mediums of expression and his lack of a central, easily digestible idea. He is a welter of contradictions: a lifelong Communist who sported expensive suits and an Alfa Romeo; a cosmopolitan who championed a peasant dialect; a poet and a filmmaker; awarded prizes by the Catholic Church and arrested as a vile pornographer. Pasolini was always a provocateur and an iconoclast, caught between purity and puerility, scatology and eschatology. Openly flaunting his homosexuality, he confronted the fascistic morality of his time with an unflinching realism about the tragic perversions of life that pervaded the lurid Roman alleyways: hustlers and prostitutes, backstabbings and secret deals. Pasolini mired himself in that imbroglio of political and sexual intrigue, and suffered as a result.

The Life and Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini presents this complicated figure through interlaced biographical vignettes, the dates and locales of which are projected onto the backdrop. We watch Pasolini plead his case in several court appearances, overhear his t

Sins of the Father

Syphilis was to the 19th century what AIDS was to the 20th: a slowly debilitating disease that society

Entropy in Elysium

Time's arrow travels in one direction only; love's arrows dart in countless, unpredictable directions. Thus, in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, the warm gymnastics of physical bodies become the foil for the cool geometry of bodies in physics. Stoppard's premise is that passion

Slaves to Image

The Maids was Jean Genet's first major text that did not have explicit homoerotic themes. Jean-Paul Sartre, however, claimed that Genet told him that the two maids should be played by men; Genet later denied he said this. The play's initial production met with mixed reviews. In 1965, the Living Theater, under the direction of Julian Beck, staged an unauthorized production with an all-male cast. Genet tried to close it down. In most subsequent and successful productions, though, men have performed the roles. So staged, the play becomes an enactment of simulacra dissolving into the very things they represent, even as the things they represent dissolve from reality altogether. Master and servant, image and beauty, truth and appearance

Honor Among Thieves

In 1948, Jean Genet, arrested for the 10th time for burglary, had been condemned to life imprisonment. By this time, his salacious autobiographical novels had gained him enough notoriety among the underground literati that such luminaries as Gide, Cocteau, and Sartre successfully petitioned the French government for his release. After their intervention, he turned from writing prose for the fugitive and solitary reveries of his novel readers to writing for the stage, which he helped transform into an equally dim-lit and dream-like forum. Deathwatch was his first play. Three prisoners confront each other in a small cell and jockey for a place in the prison's pecking order. They are only as good as the stories they tell, and the scars and tattoos that prove them. Green Eyes, a murderer soon to be condemned, sulks and explodes by turns with an unpredictable rage. His act has imbued him with a saintly nimbus within the inverted moral calculus of the jail cell.

Lefranc, a shrewd-eyed, small-time con artist, manipulates others with his smooth talk and ability to write letters for them. He is scheduled to go free in only a few days. Maurice, a petty thief, uses his good looks to get what he wants. While compulsively egging others on, he remains a coward

More Light! More Light!

I have a confession to make: this was my third time seeing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Several years ago, as a teenager visiting Chicago, I saw the original Neo-Futurists troupe, which boasts the longest-running show in the Windy City. I was mesmerized. I adored the show the way other adolescents might idolize beatnik poetry, Japanese anim

Of Excess and Incest

Behind its pomp, the Italian city of Parma festers and pullulates with lust and greed. Everyone has secrets, and is faithless to them. Violence, nihilism, and corruption rule the day; love itself is just a lubricant to more swiftly fetch one to the grave. The atmosphere of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, John Ford's 17th-century classic play, is like the black calk on a mirror's back, reflecting Romeo and Juliet's lightsome and impassioned Verona in macabre distortions. Whereas Romeo and Juliet were merely star-crossed lovers, the lovers in 'Tis Pity are double-crossed as well. As dramaturge Ben Nadler writes, "In Ford's play the nurse ends her life being tortured, the friar gives up on his young ward, the clown is wrongly assassinated, and the lovers just happen to be incestuous."

A bright young scholar, Giovanni, falls in love with his innocent and beautiful sister Annabella

Sofa, So Good

A bar with cheap drinks, a DJ spinning techno between scenes, the self-consciously urban artwork on the walls, the 10:30 start time (9 on Tuesdays), and the $10 price all give Slant Theatre Project's newest incarnation, CouchWorks, the ambience of a fun and intimate party scene. Seven topnotch playwrights with impressive r

A Lover, Not a Fighter

Many periods of history have become associated in the popular imagination with a single genre of theater. For example, the medieval mystery plays, Jacobean revenge tragedy, the closet verse-drama of the Romantic era, the great naturalistic classics of the late 19th century, and the experimental plays of early Modernism. Perhaps no era, though, has been as pigeonholed as the Restoration

Monster Mash

Everyone knows vampires are sexy. From Byron to Buffy, vampires have been the glamorous provocateurs of our imaginations' underbellies: lithe and wan and languorous after their catnap with mortality, they always strike a cool, devil-may-care attitude amidst their bloodthirsty lusts. Dance With Me, Harker proves that the undead know how to get down and dance, too. While remaining faithful to Bram Stoker's classic, writer and director Eileen Connolly has entirely revamped Dracula into a multimedia extravaganza that emphasizes the sultry "vamp" in "vampires." The show proceeds by way of a sampler platter of camp theatrical forms: it is by turns fashion show, ballet, striptease, opera, drug-induced fantasia, puppet theater, school lesson, mockumentary, ballroom dancing, oversized chess game, booming discotheque, hypnosis-by-swirling-umbrella, and poetry both high and low.

As if all of this weren't enough, there is also plenty of the requisite necking and sucking. In fact, the opening sequence begins with an entirely naked woman writhing sensually, her back to the audience. She is loosely wrapped from the waist down in translucent plastic. Off to the side, a senile nun sits crocheting a long, red scarf while she mumbles the rosary.

A video projection of a scientist comes on to remind us of the facts we must remember when dealing with nosferatu

In the Cards

First off, let's get one thing straight: If you're going to tell the story of your life, you better remember your lines. Unfortunately, Kimberlee Auerbach had to call for her lines not once but three times during the performance of her one-woman show, Tarot Reading: Love, Sex, and Mommy, that I attended, where next to me sat a prompter wielding a flashlight and a script. Tarot Reading is ostensibly the tale of a 32-year-old woman's struggles to find an empowered sense of self- and sexual enlightenment in the face of her family's eccentric and often excessive demands. There is even a "lesson" at the end: After recounting the myriad tribulations of junior high, three failed relationships, and two near-death experiences, Auerbach concludes, "I know myself, and everything's going to be OK."

In reality, however, the show only convinces us that its protagonist has a painful lack of self-awareness. When the tarot card reader, projected onto a video screen behind her, tells Auerbach that she will not be playing with a full deck, there seems to be little recognition of what this may imply.

At another moment in the piece, Auerbach replays her 15 seconds of fame as a teen model in a commercial for Le Clic, an instant camera produced by a company her father ran. In another segment, her mother, projected onto the screen in all her botoxed glory, hisses that she turned down a scholarship from the Yale School of Drama. The privileged Auerbach appears entirely consumed in a culture that consumes, locked in schlock, unable to gain any critical distance between her self and the insecurities she might have parodied.

All of her problems have readymade solutions. When she gets crabs from a one-night stand, she simply goes to the pharmacist; when she catches a mysterious numbness from a flu shot, she visits the doctor and her ailment goes away. This, along with a few humdrum relationships, is what ignites Auerbach's epiphany about how she will overcome life's adversities. My friend quipped when we left the theater, "Worse things have happened to me

Da-Da-Da

In the wake of the Great War, conventional formulas of theater were left bombed out, shattered, charred, and shrapnel-flecked: the continent of Europe lay about like a vast corpse. The old aristocracy, in its spastic death throes, ushered in an age of material and mechanical splendor. Popular culture was born. An atmosphere of giddy anarchy glistened in the dim light of Parisian cabarets

Strutting and Fretting

Great quotes become clich

Lost Love's Ghostly Visitations

"What is the beginning of happiness?/ It is to stop being so religious." These lines, from the 12th-century Sufi mystic poet Hafiz, were probably intended with a great deal of irony, seeing how Hafiz was reputed to have memorized the entire Koran 14 different ways. Happiness, he seems to be saying, is the cheap wine, while true mystical enlightenment is the next day's hangover: a woozy, achingly exact sense of the full heft and grief of things. In Jamie Carmichael's new coming-of-age play, Pilgrims, these lines are used to counterpoint the spiritual