Sherbert Illuminated

Before I proceed with this review, I’d like to thank Ms. Lentz for lending my a copy of this play. Best of luck with The Theory of Relativity this week! At the end of my (Ms. Lentz’s) copy of A Streetcar Named Desire , playwright Tenesee Wiliams interviews himself. His questions are flattering and encourage the type of beautiful monologues about “the present plague of violence and horror” that he drizzles onto the script of the play. He even addresses his choice to write about the infected: “Q: You sound as if you felt quite detached and superior to [the] process of corruption in society [you write about].” A: I have never written about any kind of vice which I can’t observe in myself” But for every question he excavates in the interview, there are a thousand he leaves buried in the text. For example: Mr. Williams, how do you know what it’s like to be a teenage girl? Blanche Dubois and Stella Kowalski, the protagonists of A Streetcar Named Desire , are technically adults —in fact, Bla

This book isn’t exactly haunted, but it possesses a mystical and bewitching rarity. It isn’t on Goodreads, and I had to manually upload it to The Storygraph. I encountered it while reshelving my school library, and was surprised to find that anyone had checked out such an obscure and cheap-looking book in the first place. The photo on the cover was a bland landscape and the title font wouldn’t have been out of place on a Wattpad mystery/romance. Even more puzzling was the attribution: “Tolstoy, Leo, graf, Wright, Hagberg.” Opening the strange book to its frontispiece, I learned that it was initially published in English in 1912 by Dr. Hagberg Wright, the late secretary of the London library. The author was Count Leo Tolstoy, famous today for books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina . While the frontispiece had cleared some things up, the lowercase “graf,” remained puzzling: did it refer to Tolstoy’s title (the Russian and German terms are linguistically unrelated) or was it an abbre

“The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black People . The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers —they are all protagonists in our epic adventure. Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die.  Ever ” (235) In the century to come, I wonder whether academics will attribute a specific style to the nonfiction of the early 21st century. Modern-day readers can recognize turn-of-the-century Communist propaganda at first glance. We know what an 18th-century pamphlet is supposed to sound like. But we don’t see the literature of our own time the same way; we recognize the stylistic choices of individuals, not generations. Is our current perspective unadulterated by the obfuscating lens of the historian? Or is it merely unrefined? The solution to this question can only be found by carefully considering a quiver of contemporary writers, such are found in Four Hundred Souls , a recent ant

    “ANGEL: Greetings, Prophet;       The Great Work begins:       The Messenger has arrived” (125) The script for this play was borrowed from Ms. Lentz (Coach L) the fabulous tech director at my high school. Thank you so much for supporting me and the rest of the theater! I first saw this play via National Theater Live when I was thirteen and knew nothing about Reagan or dramaturgy. I remember two things about it: 1) I ate a giant package of red licorice during the first four-hour production, and 2) I thought that Andrew Garfield, the brilliant actor who played Prior Walter, was Panic! at the Disco frontman Brendan Urie. Now that I’m older and (theoretically) wiser —at least, I know who Andrew Garfield and Ronald Reagan are—and I’m preparing to present my country’s theatrical tradition to an international audience, I picked up the script again. I didn’t know how much I had missed. Angels in America , the collective title of Tony Kushner’s two four-hour plays Millennium Approaches

“My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder”  When the leader of my local GSA suggested reading Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith , her one-word pitch was “Dickensian.” After reading the book, I find this comparison less than apt: what binds a book to British author Charles Dickens in the first place? The mid-Victorian setting? The weird names? The reversals of fortune and revelations of inheritance? The emphasis on morality? Fingersmith has all of those and more. But despite his authorial virtues, Charles Dickens could not have written Fingersmith for the simple reason that it’s too gay for his Vicotrian sensibilities. The novel’s premise —an experienced criminal named “Gentleman” recruits a naïve girl for the con of a lifetime—is a mere tchotchke in Dickens’ wheelhouse. But none of his corseted (albeit progressive) stories would allow Susan Trinder and Maud Lilly to fall in love. Nor would they be written from Sue’s earnest, slangy first-person perspective. The credit for this style b

These two books are a wonderful gift from Professor Demleitner! Thank you so much for your generosity, and for supporting me on my journey to learn more German. I envy the young readers of today. They have access to a prolific Middle Grade market with more imaginative worlds and relatable characters than ever before. There are fantasy adventures, mini-thrillers and books about ordinary children living their lives. Now that I’m beginning read children’s books in German, I can appreciate the planning that goes into crafting books of different genres. The two books that read most recently, Conni in der großen Stadt and Conni und die verflixte 13 by Julia Boehme, are great examples of the “ordinary kid adventures” genre. The two stories follow their titular character through the trials and tribulations of everyday life. In Conni in der großen Stadt , Conni visits her uncle and cousin in Berlin, where an accidental backpack swap leads to a madcap chase through parks, museums and even a zo

"I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic deaths” (10)   I first heard the famous anarchist Emma Goldman in the spring of 2016. This particular icon was no reanimated corpse, but a red-haired sophomore named Grace Greene with a beautiful soprano voice. She was only a bit player in Ragtime , the Ahrens and Flaherty musical my family and I had come to see, but her presence illuminated the show. In the gorgeous song “The Night that Goldman Spoke at Union Square,” she almost convinced me —as she did the character Mother’s Younger Brother— to throw my bourgeois, adolescent soul on the altar of modern-day anarchism. * My impression of her that night convinced me to pick up Goldman’s memoir, Living my Life , more than four years later. In Ragtime , Gold