The Hunter
Becomes the Hunted
"I was this magazine’s theater reviewer. Now I’ve co-written a Broadway musical. Those jobs have one big thing in common.
"What’s it like to make things for a living?
"Everyone wants to know, because who doesn’t want to make things? But everyone especially wants to know what it’s like to make things for a living if you’re someone who used to break things for a living — in either the good way or the bad way. Especially the bad way."
Theater Review:
David Mamet’s The Anarchist
"Mamet still believes in characters, but barely. He’s most interested in them as agents of basic argumentation; they’re up there to deposit the black-and-white Go stones of his logical grid. What those stones spell out, at the end of the night, is a deep anger no less fierce and consuming than his mid-period 'fuck'-offs.
"It’s the fury of a mind divided against itself: Mamet, like most American conservatives (and most Americans, period), is both a libertarian and an authoritarian, and the paradox is vexing and thrilling for him. But it is a forensic rather than a dramatic anger, and LuPone and Winger are quite obviously suffocating up there."
Theater Review:
Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark
"As maximalist camp, it succeeds thunderously. Is that what it intends to be? Irrelevant.
"To ascribe intent would be to limit the power of this show’s occasionally frightening, often confounding, always metastasizing imagination.
"I recommend Spider-man never open. I think it should be built and rebuilt and overbuilt forever, a living monument to itself."