by Jack Gohn | Feb 21, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
As we hear the voice of the “real” Tokyo Rose, it does seems that her sometimes guttural, sometimes screechy, sometimes seductive tone emanates from the Japanese national spirit and no mere individual. Yanagi is almost certainly right that the authorities convicted the wrong Tokyo Rose, but the main point isn’t that, but rather that the spirit of Tokyo Rose was ethereal, ephemeral, and not subject to being captured, either by soldiers or even by memory. Except for recordings of her voice, she is absent.
by Jack Gohn | Feb 15, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
And that, I think, is the not terribly secret, not terribly original explanation of Baltimore’s new “overnight” status as a theater town: it was the work of three generations at least: one to build the community theaters, one to build Center Stage, and one to build almost everything else upon that foundation. And if you were sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, you might have missed it.
by Jack Gohn | Feb 15, 2015 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
There is much more to Ruined than Mama’s turn as a sort of Auntie Mame-of-the-Ituri-rainforest. It is also the unflinching story of how, in the words of Salima, men wage war “on [women’s] bodies.” Rape is not simply “what soldiers do,” to quote scholar Mary Louise Roberts’ recent book on the sexual behavior of World War II GIs in Normandy; particularly in contemporary warfare it is a form of combat, aimed at destroying societies. The scene in Act Two where Salima describes what happened to her is not only uncomfortable, it is a display of raw theatrical power and a tutorial about the mechanics of social destruction in the wake of rape.
by Jack Gohn | Nov 6, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
Some plays are born strange, some achieve strangeness, and some have strangeness thrust upon them (or upon their characters, at least). We consider one of each type herein.
by Jack Gohn | Oct 11, 2014 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
How well one likes this production depends very much upon how appealing one finds the constant morphing and switching place of characters. If shifting psychodynamics are your thing, this version caters to your taste.
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.