Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Elsewhere

According to new scholarship, this is an authentic portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime, unlike the more familiar images. Not quite the rock star as portrayed in Doctor Who last year, but a lot closer...When an Oregon high school banned a production of Steve Martin's play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, and its students decided to put on an unofficial production anyway, the playwright--a wild and crazy guy--put up some of the money to do it. The ban seems motivated by a combination of squeamishness (for its "adult content") and reductive, misinformed political correctness ( "people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.") Martin says it's about "the similarity of the creative process involved in great leaps of imagination in art and science."North Coast Rep did a production of it some years ago here, which I saw and enjoyed.

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