The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/schwartz_center/page/2/)
The Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts premiered Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in its Flex Theatre yesterday. The play debuted at the Lyttelton Theatre in London in 2004, and has since become a Broadway show, a Tony Award-winner and a movie. At Cornell, it is directed by Melanie Dryer-Lude and put on by eight students and four professional actors associated with the Actors’ Equity Association.
Directed by Emily Ranii ’07, the play is inspired by a book by Prof. Emeritus Joan Jacobs Brumberg, human development, of the same name. With humor and incredible poignancy, The Body Project initiates a much needed dialogue on body image issues by exploring how contemporary women’s negative views of their bodies can have an increasingly toxic effect on their relationships with other people.
Love’s Labors Lost is one of Shakespeare’s wordiest and most intractable plays. Ostensibly a comedy — if we trust the original folio’s title page — it yet fails to end with any marriages. The play is more of a learned satire, pillorying debates from the Elizabethan period about issues of rhetoric, law, and questions of sovereignty. And yet again, as intellectual as all that sounds, Love’s Labors Lost has more penis jokes than one can shake a stick at. The play is essentially about words and about word play — about how there is no about when words come unhinged from what they seek to signify.
There were several reasons I thought I could be a successful actor.
First, Keanu Reeves. He just sort of stands there and looks pretty, both of which I’m good at, and he’s a star. Plus, he plays Ted in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, so …
Second, my impromptu performances in front of the bathroom mirror have garnered rave reviews. Amidst the fog of just-finished hot showers, I’ve done everything from remorseful sinner to dying soldier and, let me tell you, I bring down the house every time.
When a mother tells her daughter that, on the night of her birth, “it was snowing and raining at the exact same time,” it is impossible to believe that Jenny Schwartz ’95, the writer of God’s Ear, was not inspired by the weather of her dear alma mater.
A play originally performed off-off-Broadway, God’s Ear is unlike any other. It seems impossible that a piece of theater could captivate you and make you want to cover your ears at the same time. The Schwartz Center’s production of the work, however, does exactly that.
Roland Barthes, in a famous essay in Mythologies, claims that Parisian strip-tease helps to “inoculate” the viewers from eroticism under the cover of “the alibi of Art” and the “alibi of work.” That is, the strip-tease tends to ward off any outright sexual desire by both transforming the nude body into a pristine — even plasticine — art object as well as by professionalizing the routine through “the honorable practice of specialization,” (i.e. skilled labor).
Are you in grave danger? The characters in Hernani are, especially the title character and his lover, Doña Sol. Hernani — given a gender-reversing spin by Bridget Saracino ’11 — is a bandit chased by the authorities, while Doña Sol (Sharisse Taylor) is engaged to marry her uncle, the Duke (Marc Hem Lee ’10). The couple must overcome these obstacles in order to be together in this entertaining and over-the-top melodrama, directed by Katherine Karaus ’10.
Ithaca circa 2008 is certainly not England under Queen Victoria’s rule. In today’s society there are rules, of course, but where are the Victorian manners? We wear polos — not play it — and the extravagant hats of the 19th century just don’t seem to be the style anymore. But more importantly, the language of our lives — short and sweet and slangy as it is — is nothing compared to the ornamented, scathing, elaborate wit of Oscar Wilde’s England. Written over 100 years ago, The Importance of Being Earnest is certainly a product of its times: Its characters talk about fashion and literature and romantic philosophies that we’ve only read about in history books, and they regularly say things like, “How perfectly delightful!”