Arts Reviews

“WAITING FOR GODOT IS A RUBBISH PLAY.” So declared Keith McNally in an Instagram post that caught my eye. “I urge you not to see Waiting for Godot.” Accompanying the statement was an image of the two stars who headlined this fall’s production at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. The play is the latest in what regular theatergoers and visiting tourists may have started to recognize as a recurring theme in New York’s theater scene: an overwhelming number of big-name Hollywood screen actors dotting their playbills. These players are here to make their bones and increase their prestige as “true” thespians, often by attaching themselves to tired

Orson Welles (1915-85) considered the notion of posterity vulgar, but he knew that he’d be loved once he was dead. That death came suddenly, just over 40 years ago, on October 10, 1985. There was a poignancy to the way death took him – sitting at his typewriter after appearing on Merv Griffin’s talk show. By then, the co-writer, director and star of the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane (1941), hadn’t finished a film since 1973’s ignored but now quietly loved F for Fake. At the end of his life, he may have been better known as the guy in Paul Masson wine commercials than as a cinematic genius.

Which is your favorite Jane Austen novel? OK, maybe not a conversation prompt appropriate for every setting, but a reliable one, I find, to break the ice at DC dinner parties where I’m not well acquainted with my fellow guests but spy someone who seems likely to know her work. I also ask it of younger fiction writers who come looking for advice about plot construction. I once resorted to it with a stranger, a woman of a certain age, to distract me from my irritation, sitting on an Acela train inexplicably halted outside Wilmington, Delaware, for two hours. She chose Persuasion, Austen’s elegiac account of late-in-life love. All hew

Humor has become serious business. A nation of anxious primates trapped in a silicon casino of likes, retweets and dopamine-soaked drudgery, America is suffering from what the comedian Norm Macdonald called a “crisis of clapter.” Terrified of saying the wrong thing, needing punchlines to be spoon-fed – what was once the funniest place on Earth has become a tight-lipped, tongue-twisted society where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. It’s the old stink of a well-mannered aristocracy, and very un-American indeed. From his beginning, the ugly American – wild-eyed and rabble-rousing – rankled the Old World. A pandemonious lot of yahoos set loose upon a land of

In the second act of Liberation the main cast quietly, and without fuss, starts to undress. By the time the lights go up, all six women are naked. In this masterful play by Bess Wohl, the moment does not feel shocking or gratuitous but somehow comforting. In 1970s Ohio, a group of women meet weekly to fight for equality through “consciousness-raising.” Mostly that consists of free-ranging conversation, of which the women have a lot and which is always smart, funny, vulnerable and eye-opening. But after reading an article about body positivity in Ms. magazine, they meet in the nude. As one group member, Dora, ostensibly the most beautiful, breaks down

A durable national identity cannot be asserted into being