Monday, June 10, 2013
Can’t Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) be hired to host all of the televised award shows? Good thing he’s already lined up to do the 2013 Emmy Awards in June. If the producers of the Oscars…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 09:01AMSunday, June 9, 2013
Noah Baumbach’s films are typically quirky and off-beat. Rather than detailing extensive narratives of modern life and relationships, he focuses on the smaller, episodic moments of inter…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 06:43AMHello Friends, I’m finally returning to this blog, after too many months of other obligations that took me too far away. As I begin posting again, I also want to call your attention to…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 06:42AMWednesday, February 20, 2013
Watching this William Inge play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, through the lens of 21st century America offers some interesting frisson between past and present. All the sexual re…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 10:55PMSunday, February 10, 2013
Laura Marks’ incisive new play, given a lovely, spare production by the Women’s Project, in residence at City Center, considers the stakes in a faltering economy for those middle-class w…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 09:28AMThursday, February 7, 2013
The status of women directors has received relatively less airtime and press space compared to the perennial woe expressed over the paucity of women playwrights represented on Broadway (or O…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 09:23AMWednesday, January 23, 2013
Although I hadn’t yet seen it when the Oscar nominations were recently announced, I was already miffed that Kathryn Bigelow wasn’t among those listed as Best Director contenders for her …
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 08:52AMTuesday, January 15, 2013
In another excellent Playwrights Horizons production, director Carolyn Cantor and playwright Amy Herzog create a beautiful mood piece about memory from Herzog’s latest play, The Great God …
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 02:53PMFriday, January 4, 2013
I’m not a Les Miz person. That is, I don’t know all the words to the show; I can’t keep the characters straight; and I didn’t see the Broadway production until well into its run, w…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 11:44PMTuesday, December 25, 2012
There suddenly seem to be a number of recent films that boast a revised view of white male masculinity, from Your Sister’s Sister to Jeff, Who Lives at Home, to Liberal Arts. I’m not r…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 03:11PMI came out as a lesbian in Boston in 1977, into a subculture of women’s bars, women’s music, women’s theatre, and feminist newspapers and political activism. To my relief, I became p…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 03:54AMWednesday, December 19, 2012
In this sweet, small indie, Melanie Lynskey plays Amy, a heart-sick, recently divorced woman who moves from New York back into her parents’ house in Westport, Connecticut, because she can�…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 04:32PMTuesday, December 18, 2012
During a fall semester so busy that I haven’t been able to blog for almost eight weeks, one of my guilty television pleasures has been watching Nashville (ABC), which is now on hiatus unti…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 08:47AMSaturday, October 13, 2012
Josh Radnor wrote, directed, and stars in Liberal Arts, a lovely film about an emotionally “stunted” 35-year-old man who visits his alma mater and realizes he’s never really grown up.�…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 12:46PMSunday, September 30, 2012
Katori Hall’s 2011 play takes on the difficult task of theatricalizing the haunting national trauma of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda by considering the children of Hutu militia born after th…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 05:17AMSunday, September 23, 2012
Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer Prize, which ultimately went to Quiara Alegría Hudes’s more earnest Water by the Spoonful. Detroit is instead a rath…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 02:18PMSunday, September 9, 2012
Written and directed by Leslye Headland, based on her play of the same name, Bachelorette is like a car wreck from which it’s difficult to look away. That the movie is good is part of th…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 10:04PMWednesday, September 5, 2012
This lovely film directed by Behn Zeitlin and co-written by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, based on her play, Juicy and Delicious, received superb reviews when it opened earlier this summer, a ha…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 01:05PMSaturday, August 11, 2012
Chely Wright is a country music singer who debuted in 1994 and achieved her life’s dream by becoming part of the Grand Ole Opry tradition, recording several Top 40 and number one so…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 09:36AMJust to apologize that The Feminist Spectator has been on hiatus this last month. Although I’ve not been posting, I’ve been writing. Palgrave Macmillan is publishing selected…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 07:53AMMonday, July 9, 2012
Dael Orlandersmith’s poetic two-hander Yellowman was Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, after she spent many years as a solo performer (touring with, among other performance work, the Nuyori…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 12:53PMThursday, June 14, 2012
Luis Alfaro’s Bruja at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre continues his recent spate of Latino-themed adaptations of classic Greek plays. Following Oedipus el Rey, which premiered at the Ma…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 02:48PMSaturday, June 2, 2012
What novelty to see a play that’s not only by and about a woman but that takes feminism as its topic and theme. Gina Gionfriddo’s (Becky Shaw) new play uses the history of the second w…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 11:36AMThursday, May 24, 2012
Shonda Rimes’ new television series arrived at its first season finale last week, after a terrific premiere and seven-week run and the promise of renewal for a second season. Kerry Washi…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 06:57AMTuesday, May 22, 2012
I’m coming late to the controversy over the resoundingly white male-written and -directed season announced for the Guthrie next year, in part because I’m tired of hearing myself …
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 12:01PMThursday, May 17, 2012
Smash ended its first season this week, and has been renewed for a second, minus Theresa Rebeck, its creator and original show runner (and one of the only women playwrights to be produced on…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 12:11AMMonday, May 7, 2012
The ceremony at which I received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2010-2011 was staged in Prospect House at Princeton University on April 28, 2012. Cornell professor…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 04:30PMWednesday, April 18, 2012
Lena Dunham’s HBO series has been hailed for its sharp, insightful snapshot of 20-something young, white, straight women navigating their New York City lives in a post-Sex and the City mom…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 09:28AMThursday, April 5, 2012
FYI, Split Britches will receive the Edwin Booth Award from the Theatre Program of the CUNY Graduate Center today. I’m sure it’ll be a wonderful conversation. See the link for de…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 06:12PMWednesday, April 4, 2012
How sweet is the taste of a movie with a female heroine heralded as the top-grossing non-sequel film debut weekend of all time? And how sweet is it that The Hunger Games, the adaptation …
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 03:22PMFriday, March 30, 2012
The HBO-produced adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s best-selling 2009 book, Game Change centers on the John McCain-Sarah Palin part of the ticket for the 2008 Presidential el…
SOURCE: The Feminist Spectator at 03:25PM 
