Читать книгу Mr. Burns and Other Plays - Anne Washburn - Страница 2

“Anne Washburn is America’s bard of the peripherally glimpsed, the half-eavesdropped, the shakily grasped. Her plays immerse characters in baffling subcultures, and the audience must follow along . . . Abundant wonder, whimsy, even horror . . . Washburn finds the beauty and strangeness of playmaking, the nobility of an often futile pursuit.”

—David Cote, Time Out New York

“Fascinating and hilarious . . . With each of its three acts, Mr. Burns grows grander . . . Washburn reminds us of the ways stories survive and adapt with us, how their specifics and lessons change to the society that tells them, how their meaning is inconstant but our need for that meaning, whatever it happens to be at a given time, is pure and permanent . . . This play demonstrates the power and primacy of theater itself.”

—Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice

“10 Out of 12 is steeped in a doubt-tinged religious wonder that, at some point in an unforeseeable future, unity may emerge from this calibrated chaos . . . The evening’s accumulated frustrations blend joyously into a wholly original love song to the maddening art of the theater.”

—Ben Brantley, New York Times

“Mr. Burns has a very distinct kind of thrill, the one that kicks in when you have absolutely no idea where a play is going, except that it is not likely to be any place you recall being before in a theater. This thrill is one of expansiveness of vision—an intellectual rush, a sense of unexplored theatrical possibility, a fearlessness of operation.”

—Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“Mr. Burns is one of the most spectacularly original plays in recent memory.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Gradually this absurd, unreal performance comes to encapsulate not just the old, now-mythical way of life and the new one within the world of the play, but also our own. It feels increasingly like one of the oldest Greek dramas which served to affirm the polis to which actors and audience alike belonged . . . The intellectual fascination of the patterned material of Mr. Burns meshes with an emotional significance on an instinctual level.”

—Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times

“Washburn’s play Mr. Burns is pretty out there in many respects, but each scenario is beautifully realized, and it presents a compelling query: Faced with uncertainty, would we salvage what’s ‘important’ for the human race? Or what comforts us? And is there really a difference? . . . Even if you’ve somehow never seen a frame of The Simpsons (though seriously, have a word with yourself), the bold vistas of Washburn’s imagination are thrillingly provocative in themselves . . . its message is ultimately a comforting one: Just like cockroaches and Twinkies, theater and stories will survive the end of days, no matter how strangely.”

—Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out London