Reviews for New Downtown Now: An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York

The average rating for New Downtown Now: An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-10-01 00:00:00 Huoo Qian An incredible anthology, which demonstrates (sadly) that there's a ton of amazing stuff going on in the world of theater, and we'll never see most of it. Living in New York is too large a price to pay (literally and figuratively) for most people, period. So here are ten plays by nine authors. There are at least five authors in here who negotiate a strange path between figurative and normative speech, and hit absolute bullseyes, achieving remarkably assured, unconventional, and yet completely convincing visions for what theater might be. Madelyn Kent, Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Elana Greenfield, and Barbara Cassidy are almost all new names to me, and now I want to read / see everything I possibly can by them. I'm afraid it won't be much -- but at least now I know I should be trying. I personally didn't go for Kevin Oakes or Erin Courtney's plays, though I admire their skill as writers (psyche-as-horror/freakshow, either overt or covert, seems too well-trodden a path to me). And the remaining authors seem to be holding themselves back -- they've got everything in place to show us something clear and striking, but they're too nervously looking over their shoulders to follow through. (For example: Will Eno seems almost desperate to avoid political cliches -- so why is he so willing to embrace psychological cliches? And why the weird moralistic tone, culminating in full-blown homophobic porno-morality play, in Alice Tuan's supposedly transgressive "Ajax?") Just some thoughts. As far as I know, this book is the only way to read the work of some of these writers, who in my opinion are doing the most interesting writing so far this century. So, my qualms about individual works don't prevent the book as a whole from being essential to any theater library.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-26 00:00:00 Dominic Gagliano CONFIDENCE in INSCRUTABILITY This less well-known novel by Henry James is certainly worth reading. Published between The Europeans and Washington Square, the reader may think that Daisy Miller has come back to life so that she can finish it. This is also a good novel to read for those who are scared of Henry James and his inscrutability. For the language is polished, is crafted, but it is not ambiguous. Or at least it is not overtly ambiguous even if James can play with the reader using ambiguities. Plus there is his fine irony and humor. In this book one senses that he must have enjoyed writing it. I used to see James as an aesthetician but I am beginning to see his roots in the 19C concerns with morality. The concern he tackled in Roderick Hudson - to what extent ought one to interfere with somebody else's life reappears in these pages again. But only to then be discarded. Or may be not entirely. The French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1897) is mentioned twice in the novel - one of the characters, who engages in 'casuistry', is presented reading his books. This intrigued me because Cousin is the only theoretician alluded to in the entire book and it made me think that Henry James could have been engaged with Cousin's ideas while writing his novel. Not having read Cousin's works, I just investigated in the web. From what I could gather, Cousin insisted on the strength and power of psychological observation; he also contended with the potential of the 'Self' and free volition. And may be these ideas are at the core of the somewhat enigmatic title of the book, Confidence. To put this assuredness into action, James resorted to another of his female creations, the reborn Daisy Miller, an "Angela" who this time becomes the vehicle for shaping, in a 'Cousin-manner', an ending that, unusually in James, is enclosed, clean and somewhat comic. And this is done with a full, but somewhat inscrutable, Confidence.