Arts Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Steel Valley Visions: An American Legacy

by Erica Nuckles & Silvia Filippini-Fantoni

Throughout western Pennsylvania’s big steel era, artists captured a compelling visual record of the industry’s rise and fall: grit and glory, power and peril, beauty and brutality. At its height, the region’s three rivers reflected the brightness of fire and molten metal, and thick smoke filled the air. This was a place where muscle met …

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Kinetic’s “Henry Johnson” Asks Visceral Questions With No Easy Answers

by Stuart Sheppard

If you remember the scene in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” when Al Pacino’s character bamboozles some poor sap in a bar with a stream of grandiloquent bullshit, and sells him on a worthless real estate investment, then you have a good idea what his new play (presented by Kinetic Theatre, in only its third …

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Barebones Says No to Nothing in “Our Dear Drug Lord”

by Stuart Sheppard

I once asked Barebones artistic director Patrick Jordan about something risky he did in a play, and he responded, without hesitation, “I’ll say no to nothing.” This ethos is certainly the basis for the company’s new production, “Our Dear Drug Lord,” (2019) in which four high school girls try to conjure the ghost of the …

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An Archeology of Seeing: David Muenzer’s Compelling “Exit Interview” Exhibition

by Stuart Sheppard

There are two kinds of artists one encounters in contemporary exhibitions: those who exist on the superficial, apparent plane of the obvious, and those who offer something deeper, with meaning to be found on multiple levels. (There is also nonsensical, banal art, but for the sake of argument, let’s concentrate on the former two styles). …

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Pittsburgh Ballet’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Reaches for the Sublime

by Stuart Sheppard

We are often surprised by the little things we find when someone passes away, things we were perhaps not aware of, or things that were saved because they carried an importance we didn’t realize. In the case of my mother, who passed not long ago, I found, in her closet, the ballet shoes she wore …

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Barebones’ “Infinite Life” Offers a Night of Revelatory Drama

by Stuart Sheppard

Between the actor and the viewer exists a crucial component of the theatrical experience: the character of the space between them. Size of stage, type of stage, and distance between the audience and the stage are rarely cited as qualities that engender the success of a play, but I would argue, after experiencing Barebones Productions’ …

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Pittsburgh Opera’s “Time To Act” Asks What If Sophocles Wrote “The Breakfast Club”?

by Stuart Sheppard

We may not know much about how Ancient Greek drama was performed, but we do know that it was fundamentally a musical, and more pointedly, a choral event. Furthermore, according to scholar Peter Wilson, it was the “sixteenth-century Florentine pioneers of opera who conceived of their new cultural project as basically a regeneration of Greek …

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Public Theater’s Cinematic “An Enemy of the People”

by Stuart Sheppard

I have always loved the fact that, as a young man, James Joyce was so enamored of Henrik Ibsen that he learned Dano-Norwegian to read the playwright in his native language. And Joyce’s self-proclaimed first mature work, a play ironically called “A Brilliant Career,” was the story of a doctor battling the pestilence infecting a …

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Barebones Gets Its Teeth Into “God of Carnage”

by Stuart Sheppard

The living room has always been one of the most dangerous places in America, because it’s a space that brings people into close contact, allows them to share their feelings, and usually happens to be where the alcohol is stored. As we’ve learned from plays such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and “Long Day’s …

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Pittsburgh Opera Delivers a Rapturous “La Bohème”

by Stuart Sheppard

We tend to view “bohemia” through a hagiographic lens, but its inception, as depicted by the French writer Henri Murger in a series of vignettes entitled Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851), was hardly romantic. The first bohemians were poor, often living in squalid conditions, and suffered morbid degradations in physical as well as mental terms. …

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Art is a Conversation, Not a Lecture

by Patrick Fisher

We read Stuart Sheppard’s recent piece for Pittsburgh Quarterly, “Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves?” with interest, and a fair amount of disagreement. Centering on Kara Walker’s recent exhibition at the Frick, which featured annotations from a select group of Pittsburgh-based guest labelists alongside the artwork, the article raises questions …

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Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves?

by Stuart Sheppard

Imagine if before the performance of a play, the director stepped on stage and told the audience what it was supposed to think about it. Viewers would be insulted. Or perhaps laugh. Some might even walk out. Yet this kind of didactic inculcation is quite normal in museums today. In fact, because the exhibitive experience …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods Arts Culture

Reimaging a Home

by Vicky A Clark

Steep and narrow Rialto Street, once known as Pig Hill and the route from the Allegheny River to the slaughterhouse, is a piece of Pittsburgh history. At the top of the hill is a new addition to local experience, the art houses of Troy Hill. As contemporary interpretations of historic house museums — Henry Clay …

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Quantum’s “Seagull” Reinvigorates Chekhov

by Stuart Sheppard

Gender-flipping classic roles in theater has become so commonplace that it’s now almost de rigueur. What director wants to go to a hipster cocktail party these days and confess that he or she is casting a white cis male as Hamlet? I’ve seen so many female Julius Caesars that I now expect the play to …

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American Spirit Arts Culture

Gorson Bio and an Exhibit at The Westmoreland

by Maxwell King

The first two decades of the 20th century were an extraordinary time for Pittsburgh and for the whole world that bought the steel produced in western Pennsylvania’s mills. The Pittsburgh region dominated the world in the production of steel, and that new alloy utterly changed civilization as the new century advanced. The cars, trucks, rails, bridges, skyscrapers and airplanes that heralded a …

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The Time It Takes Between the Takes

by Stuart Sheppard

In his celebrated writing workshop of the early 1990s, editor and literary guru Gordon Lish taught that one of the best ways to create an effective agon is to place divergent characters in a confined space – and let them act on their own volition, without smothering them in authorial intent. And that’s exactly what …

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Kinetic Theatre’s “Embers” Tells All

by Stuart Sheppard

That Kinetic Theatre Company’s “Embers” is such a moving play should be counterintuitive: it violates one of the most basic rules of art, “show don’t tell.” This is a work that shows nothing and tells everything, which is doubly ironic, as its principal character, who does most of the telling, does not trust language. Based …

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Briefly Noted

by Stuart Sheppard

I was fortunate to attend another remarkable boundary-blurring performance recently: the world premiere of the long-lost “Markus Passion” by Bach. A joint-effort by Chatham Baroque, Renaissance Baroque, The Sebastians, and Joseph Marcell — based on archival interpretations and recreations of a vanished manuscript from the Bach corpus — the performance of this fusion of libretto, …

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Pittsburgh Opera and Chatham Baroque Blur Performative Boundaries

by Stuart Sheppard

These are certainly synergistic days in the arts. Theater companies are staging operas, operas are staging plays, dancers are speaking in ballets, and everyone is projecting video. Museums are mixing it up, too, but then, they always have. It’s certainly been a win for audiences – at least in Pittsburgh – where we have so …

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PICT’s “Miss Julie:” A Triangle with Four Sides

by Stuart Sheppard

Modern adaptations of classic plays often look like someone wearing borrowed clothes: they don’t fit quite right, and it’s obvious that the person wearing them had to struggle to put them on. But when an adaptation of a play like August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (1888) really does justice to its antecedent and fits the subject …

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Total War Over Cocktails

by Stuart Sheppard

If there’s a miracle in Pittsburgh Public Theater’s current performance of the 1962 Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — it’s that two well-educated couples can argue drunkenly for over three hours and never once broach the subject of politics. (And these couples are of different generations, no less). Of course, this would …

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The Bitch of Being a Witch

by Stuart Sheppard

Sometime around the turn of the millennium – resulting from what I would ascribe to the rise of social media and cable broadcasting — the term “trope” began to lose its classic and pregnant meaning of “figure of speech,” (i.e. an expression used in a nonliteral sense). It has devolved so that it now indicates …

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