Dog Ear

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Sexing up Shakespeare is a handy trick for directors seeking to exploit the Bard’s bawdy humour to put bums on seats. Now one woman has gone further with the most intensive search ever for sexual innuendo, toilet humour and smut buried deep in the national poet’s oeuvre.

In Sunday’s Guardian, David Smith writes about Heloise Senechal’s titillating new footnotes for a Royal Shakespeare Company edition of the complete works. Tickle this link.

Mickey Birnbaum

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In today’s New York Times, Jonathan Kalb examines Beckett’s influence on the current generation of playwrights:

SOME years back, the playwright Tony Kushner amused a conference audience by talking about two different types of theatrical enterprises: “lasagna” dramaturgy and “matzo” dramaturgy.

His own plays, like “Angels in America,” clearly fell into the lasagna category, he said, providing a grandiose, chewy and multilayered immersion in particular social realities. Matzo drama, by contrast, was thin and spare; it required what Mr. Kushner called a “spiritual discipline” that he didn’t feel equal to, and to him the quintessential “matzo of a playwright” was Samuel Beckett.

I can’t read on, I’ll read on, here.

Mickey Birnbaum

In the Sunday Seattle Times, Misha Berson offers up a smart analysis of current trends in political theater:

“Few people attend theater to be lectured at, browbeaten or hectored about what they already believe — or choose not to believe. But plays triggered by contentious, newsworthy events of our day don’t have to be dry or message-mongering. And just as the 2006 Oscar race was dominated by quality films pondering race relations, gay rights, the geopolitics of oil and terrorism, so is topical stage drama making a quiet but palpable comeback locally, for the first time in a long while. “

Read more here.

Mickey Birnbaum

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — Dagmar Havlova, wife of a former Czech president, is to return to the stage this week in a critically acclaimed play by American author Israel Horovitz.

The former first lady, who turns 53 next week, will co-star with Petr Kostka in ”Park Your Car in Harvard Yard” at the Vinohradske Theater in Prague beginning Friday.

”It is a beautiful play and it fills me with joy,” Havlova said.

Under her maiden name Dagmar Veskrnova, she made more than 50 movies and starred in countless TV shows and theater performances before she married Vaclav Havel in 1997 and retired from acting, devoting most of her time to charity.

Havel, 69, a dissident playwright, became president after the 1989 ”Velvet Revolution” toppled the Communist regime in then Czechoslovakia. He retired from politics in 2003 after completing his second and final term as Czech president.