Stuart Sheppard is an award-winning critic, essayist, novelist, and poet who writes “The Hamlet Machine” column for Pittsburgh Quarterly. Follow him: @HamletsMachine.
Seeing the World Through Music
Nietzsche famously castigated Euripides for killing the tradition of the chorus in Greek tragedy, because the audience no longer had music to inform its comprehension. He even felt that Euripides caused the death of tragedy itself by trying to make it too Socratic, too rational. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” might …
Quantum’s Surreal “The River” Transfixes
In Richard Brautigan’s classic surrealist novel, Trout Fishing In America, the narrator visits a store selling trout streams by the foot. They are stacked in piles like pieces of lumber, each length corresponding to a different price. In Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River, produced by Quantum Theatre, it’s as if they picked out a …