Gautam Dasgupta

The Director as Thinker: Carmelo Bene's Otello

Carmelo Bene, actor, dramatist, and director, is the youngest of the triumverate of major theatrical adventurers (the other two are Giorgio Strehler and Dario Fo) who have come to dominate Italian theatre over the past two decades. Although his visibility on American shores has been largely eclipsed by the belated discovery of his two senior colleagues, Bene arrived here much earlier as the imperious Creon in Pasolinis film Oedipe Re. Within Italy, and since the early sixties, Bene has occupied a unique position among a wide spectrum of theatregoers and practitioners. Eschewing the overtly political dimension of Fo and the tantalizing theatricalism characteristic of Strehler, he has created a singular brand of dramaturgy that embraces an adolescent love of the poetic visions of Laforgue, Rimbaud, Lautr6amont and a more mature coming to terms with theories of literary deconstruction and post-structuralist psychoanalytic thought. Add on to this an energetic infatuation with technology (primarily aural) and there begins to emerge a fairly sharp picture of the bewildering complexities that inform a Carmelo Bene production. Perhaps because of these concerns, he has successfully bridged the gap between young and old, playing to a generational spread of audiences drawn from diverse fields.

Theatre Beyond Space and Time

The brilliant, visionary artist Reza Abdoh (1963–1995) was an Iranian-born theatre director, playwright, and founder of his own theatre company Dar A Luz. Encompassing theatre, dance, literature, pop culture, video, and myth, his works include Bogeyman, Father Was a Peculiar Man, Tight Right White, and Quotations from a Ruined City, and were primarily seen in Los Angeles, New York City, and Europe. The PAJ Publications title Reza Abdoh, edited by Daniel Mufson, featuring essays on him and the text of The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, was published in 1999. His play, The Law of Remains, appears in the PAJ volume Plays for the End of the Century (1996). Abdoh’s work was so daring and original that the memory of his theatre productions, produced often in abandoned or site-specific spaces, has long remained for those who were fortunate to see his work, and then spread to those who never had that opportunity. Since Abdoh’s death, a documentary of his life has been made by Adam Soch. Reza Abdoh, a retrospective of the artist’s work, opened on June 3, 2018, at MoMA PS1 in Queens. The interview published here for the first time is from the archive of PAJ Publications. It was taped on April 7, 1994.

Art and Consciousness

Iremember very well the day we taped this interview with Susan Sontag. Gautam Dasgupta and I were already waiting in her apartment at 106th Street when she arrived and, smiling, said “I’m all yours” before settling down for our conversation. She had just returned from a chemotherapy treatment. She was wearing brown slacks and a brown sweater, with a gold silk Indian scarf, folded at her neck. It was February 1977. Susan Sontag was forty-four years old. We were planning the interview for the fifth issue of PAJ, which was published the fall of that year.

The Hopeless Dream of "Being": Ingmar Bergman's The Ghost Sonata

Upon encountering a work— any work, be it in film, theatre, transcribed screenplays, dramatic texts, and memoirs—by Ingmar Bergman, there is scant little that any critic can add as testimonial to the inarguable artistic genius—and there is no other word for it—associated with the name of that distinguished Swede. His legendary output in films from the 1950s on until the early 80s is munificence enough to nourish a sensate soul’s appetite for human discernment and spiritual longings. To even suggest that works such as Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and Through a Glass Darkly are masterpieces is to state the obvious. Through piercing psychological insights into all-too-human foibles, an eye for the telling detail that lies deep and unknowable in the vast recesses of our complex psyches, and an unerring ability to mine the richly evocative personae of his actors—each of them (and I expect the reader to know who they are) a signal and equal collaborator in degree and kind to the director’s vision—Bergman’s searing depictions of relationships between people as they struggle to make sense out of their existence is unparalleled in the history of film, if not in the art of recent decades.

Berlin's New Jewish Museum: An Interview with Tom Freudenheim

FREUDENHEIM: It’s like being in the middle of a maelstrom, with too many people waiting to come into the museum. It’s an unusual situation and we don’t have the staff to deal with it. Most places are trying to figure out how to get their stories across and to get their picture in the papers and get the press out to them. We can’t keep them away. So, it is quite astounding that this empty building draws so much attention. On the other hand, it’s quite an opportunity because really interesting buildings are seldom available to be seen as empty buildings.