Email Author Michael Feingold

Awards

• 2010 - The Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism/Columbia University

  Theater Reviews

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2001 Stories by Michael Feingold

• Disorientalism

  published December 25, 2001

  Let's give Tony Kushner the praise he deserves. Finished before 9-11, his latest play draws an emphatic circle on the map around the place... More >>

• Scrambled Egos

  published December 18, 2001

  Little stories of little people only became central to the theater in the last half of the 20th century—just when you think it would have... More >>

• Cheek to Cheek

  published December 11, 2001

  It weighs just under six pounds, a bulky rectangle 11 by 12 inches. Most of its 530 pages are triple columned. Heavy as a casket of coins, it... More >>

• Less Is Moor

  published December 11, 2001

  Greed is the drama critic's prevailing sin. Not greed for power or money—though none of us would complain if the artists all did exactly what... More >>

• Parlez-Vous Français?

  published September 4, 2001

  For the last half century, French playwriting's been dominated by two masters of language who in some ways couldn't be less French: the Irishman... More >>

• My Vanishing Act

  published September 4, 2001

  This will be my last Voice column for the next three months. Hold your applause, please—I'm not retiring or resigning. And, no, they... More >>

• Caught in the Fact

  published August 28, 2001

  What is a fact? In the theater, most often, a fictional invention: Iago has been passed over for promotion, John Proctor has had an affair with... More >>

• But Unseriously . . .

  published August 21, 2001

  Some recent phenomena—among them The Producers, Urinetown, Bat Boy—have been making me ponder again the future of... More >>

• Gull Talk

  published August 14, 2001

  Where did the concept of "all-star" Chekhov productions begin? Probably with Katharine Cornell's 1943 rendition of The Three Sisters,... More >>

• Now Hear Disc

  published August 7, 2001

  For an allegedly dead art form, the musical theater certainly keeps turning out, on compact disc, evidence of life. Anybody can produce a CD... More >>

• Giving Us Pause

  published July 31, 2001

  For a brief time and a lucky affluent elite, the New York theater shrugged off its summer doldrums to become what I can't resist calling a Pinter... More >>

• Arms and the Woman

  published July 17, 2001

  What, I wonder, would an audience of 20-year-olds make of Major Barbara? That is, assuming you could get them to sit still for an evening... More >>

• You Must Remember Disc

  published July 10, 2001

  The compact discs usually start trickling in before Christmas, with a major flood around Tony time, and every June I stack them in two little... More >>

• Home, Swede Home

  published July 3, 2001

  According to Zeami, master spirit of the Noh drama, every great play has to contain yugen, "mystery." That being so, August Strindberg's... More >>

• The Duke of Hazard

  published June 26, 2001

  They call Measure for Measure a "problem play," I begin to think, in the same sense in which a recalcitrant infant is a "problem child." It... More >>

• Boom Times

  published June 19, 2001

  In the opening scene of Breath, Boom, a teenage girl is brutally beaten by a gang of her closest friends. Very near the play's end, the... More >>

• Pleasures and Paints

  published June 12, 2001

  How funny, just now, that playwrights should be imagining painters as heroes. We live at a time when contemporary painting, like playwriting... More >>

• Son Blocks

  published June 5, 2001

  Gertrude, watching Hamlet duel, says, "He's fat and scant o' breath." Directors often cut this line, for obvious reasons; commentators explain... More >>

• Playing Together

  published May 29, 2001

  Funny that respectable farm folk should name their town "Thief River." These days, even Hell's Kitchen, where Lee Blessing's play is being... More >>

• Loners With Interest

  published May 22, 2001

  I had a momentary fantasy while weighing up the first two plays on this week's list: I envisioned the hero of Nocturne marrying the heroine... More >>

• Device Squads

  published May 15, 2001

  The thundering stampede of new plays having abated with the arrival of prize-giving season, the New York theater doesn't pause, but uses its... More >>

• The Sorrow and the City

  published May 8, 2001

  A quality-of-life graph of August Wilson's 10-play cycle, spanning the decades of 20th-century African American life, would probably reveal a slow... More >>

• Reduced Spring Classics

  published May 1, 2001

  Is there a more intelligent and passionately committed director at work today than Peter Brook? And is there a more evasive and frustrating... More >>

• Glitzkrieg

  published April 24, 2001

  If you leave aside the brutality, horror, devastation, and mass slaughter that it caused, Nazism was nothing but showbiz. Legions of commentators... More >>

• Love Machinery

  published April 17, 2001

  José Rivera's new play is a simple one-scene confrontation between two people who love each other; a standard-issue naturalistic playwright... More >>