Terry Teachout
Terry Teachout
Terry Teachoutis an American critic, biographer, librettist, author, playwright, and blogger. He is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings," a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal. He blogs at About Last Night and has written about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and National Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth6 February 1956
CountryUnited States of America
I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.
I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing 'dumber,' if what you really mean to say is 'less culturally literate.'
Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.
I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.
Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.
Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed.
Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.
Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.
Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers.
Most 'Monty Python' fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age.
'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.
Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.
Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.