Ira S. Murfin
Among the most basic assumptions of live performance is that an emphatic through line will move us intentionally ever forward, directing our attention to what needs to be noted before delivering us to an end point from which the accumulated experience will be made retroactively unified. But, taken together, the four performances that [...]
Joe Frank Just an Ordinary Man at Steppenwolf Theater March 13th
Ira S. Murfin
For close on 30 years, Joe Frank has been a very particular and esoteric presence on the radio, an idiosyncratic and difficult to categorize voice that speaks with an intimacy that feels, despite all evidence to the contrary, like you are the only one that [...]
Ira S. Murfin
The World is Flat! A Weekend of Toy Theater curated by Seth Bockley at Links Hall opened with the contemporary revivers of the form, Great Small Works from New York, presenting A Short Entertaining History of Toy Theatre, a lecture-song with pictures on the populist provenance of toy theatre. As Dr. John Bell [...]
Gretchen Holmes
Three years ago, I had my first bikini wax in preparation for my re-performance of Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll,” a piece she debuted in 1975 that has endured as a simultaneously cliché and outré icon of feminist body art. The gesture was, first and foremost, an attempt to convey my commitment to engaging in [...]