Midway through Asghar Farhadi’s “The Salesman,” Emad, the actor and schoolteacher who serves as the Oscar-nominated film’s protagonist, seizes one of his student’s phones, hoping to delete photos the student has taken of him sleeping. He castigates the boy for the risqué images he finds, telling him his father needs to look at them. A…
After a string of celebrity deaths this past year, the patron saint of New York celebrities has died as well. As dnainfo reports, Stanley Bard, once the manager of the Chelsea Hotel, died in Boca Raton, Florida on Tuesday at 82. As manager of the Chelsea Hotel, Bard turned the institution into a hot spot…
On the brink of Thanksgiving, your mind is likely on the holiday – its pleasures and stresses alike – but find some time this week to indulge in great new reads, the long-heralded return of Amy Sherman Palladino’s “Gilmore Girls,” and, if you can drag yourself off your couch, concerts and plays in Chicago, Los…
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
The trouble with a play like Arthur Miller’s “An Incident at Vichy” is the ubiquitous presence of Holocaust narratives in contemporary films and books. Recently, on NPR’s “Fresh Air” Terry Gross said of the movie “Son of Saul,” “At this point, I don’t want to go to a theater to watch such unbearable suffering unless…
“And if I seem to tell this like a dream,” says the lawyer who serves as narrator, as the play reaches its brutal resolution, “it was that way.” The lawyer is Alfieri, our guide through postwar Red Hook in Arthur Miller’s 1955 classic, “A View From the Bridge.” And in the production that opened last…
Is “Death of a Salesman” a Jewish play? Is Willy Loman, its main character, Jewish? The question has been asked almost since “Salesman” was first produced, in 1949. Loman’s precarious life was the fate of many Jews in the 20th century, and playwright Arthur Miller — whose centenary is being celebrated this month — was…
The son of Polish Holocaust survivors, Larry N. Mayer grew up in the Bronx, NY. His first book, “Who Will Say Kaddish?: A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland” was published by Syracuse University Press in 2002. He has worked with at-risk high school students for over fifteen years, and wrote about his experiences…
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