You always learn something new when you watch somebody drink. Not that vino leads to veritas in any literal way—but, over the span of a long, soggy night, small, revealing details, often more gestural than verbal, accumulate. How your fellow-partygoer holds a glass, or how often she takes a drink, or what counts, in her world, as a cocktail: all of this helps you to know her better, to figure out where she’s really coming from. Two recent productions—“Des Moines,” the final play by the late Denis Johnson, from 2007, and a revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy,” from 2014, in its Broadway premiére—feature alcohol as a spur and a guiding presence, a conduit to otherwise fugitive knowledge.
The central event of Des Moines’— directed by Arin Arbus, for Theatre for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center—is an impromptu gathering that quickly becomes a drinkfuelled bacchanal. Dan Arliss Howard) and Marta Johanna Day) are an aging couple further aged by sorrows that they find hard to articulate, and by a stubborn but unspoken ambivalence about the substance and meaning of their lives. At the beginning of the play, whose main setting is their kitchen, they’re talking past each other in a way that makes their anomie plain. Dan, a cabdriver, has recently come into contact with Mrs. Drinkwater Heather Alicia Simms), whose husband died in a plane crash. Dan's cab was the last car the poor guy ever rode in. As he tries to relate this story to Marta, she’s more worried about whether he plans to eat a full meal. So is this new diet some sort of spiritual thing?” she asks. Because I made spaghetti. Is this a spiritual pilgrimage you're on, Dan, with the cereal?”
Esta historia es de la edición January 02 - 09, 2023 (Double Issue) de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición January 02 - 09, 2023 (Double Issue) de The New Yorker.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.