Sunday Reading: Luminaries of the Theatre

The groundbreaking playwright Ntozake Shange has remarked that “one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconsciousness and conscious emotional responses to being alive.” Her statement also encapsulates the experience of going to the theatre and being awakened to new perspectives and universes of thought. Theatre is a communal endeavor that brings us together in ways that other art forms do not. In times of crisis or unease, it can offer a meaningful, revelatory balm.

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This week, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces about the theatrical experience. In “Deconstructing Sondheim,” Stephen Schiff profiles the legendary composer of musicals that include “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park with George.” “Sondheim has always said that he never set out to revolutionize an art form,” Schiff writes, “but that is precisely what he did: he and his collaborators grabbed the musical by the scruff and hauled it from the dreamy classicism of Rodgers and Hammerstein into the jittery, anomic modernist era—and beyond.” In “Been Here and Gone,” John Lahr explores the exhilarating professional trajectory of the playwright August Wilson. Hilton Als writes about Shange’s innovative artistry, and Andy Logan talks with Tennessee Williams about his hit Broadway show “The Glass Menagerie.” “Williams,” Logan observes, “is a small, quiet man with rather close-clipped hair and a heart which is a little too unstable to allow him to be in the Army. Collectors of psychosomatic lore will be fascinated to learn that he was once paralyzed for two weeks, apparently as a gesture of protest against working in a shoe store.” In “How Lorraine Hansberry Wrote ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ ” Lillian Ross considers how the playwright, then just twenty-eight, created her masterwork about race in America. In “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible,’ ” Arthur Miller reflects on McCarthyism and the politics of paranoia that birthed his classic play about the Salem witch trials. In “King’s Speech,” Michael Schulman profiles Katori Hall, whose acclaimed 2011 drama, “The Mountaintop,” depicts the last hours of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s life. Finally, in “Tony Kushner’s Paradise Lost,” Arthur Lubow contemplates the playwright’s masterpiece, “Angels in America,” and chronicles the relationships that most influenced his work. “Kushner took AIDS—a political issue too big to ignore—and poured into it the survivor’s guilt, the rage of the sick at the healthy, the caretaker’s balancing of self-sacrifice and self-interest, which he knew from tending to his injured friend,” Lubow writes. “ ‘I have spattered our relationship all over this play,’ he said.”

—Erin Overbey, archive editor

It’s not just that Stephen Sondheim writes musicals that are unlike anything the American theatre has known before. Even his method of composition is revolutionary.

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