The Playgoer: Some Theatre News

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Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Some Theatre News

-Despite all the recent closings, Broadway was a billion dollar business in 2008.

-Mark Lamos, for years head of Hartford Stage and one of the busiest directors in LORT, is now taking over the little Westport County Playhouse.

-Turns out Harold Pinter was a showman to the end, dictating plans for his own funeral. Most movingly, he asked the great Michael Gambon to read a passage from his masterpiece No Man's Land, in which Gambon was starring on the West End when the playwright was dying.

The passage?

HIRST: I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it that might remind you of your own of what you once were. You might see faces of others in shadow or cheeks of others turning or jaws or backs of necks or eyes, dark under hat, which might remind you of others whom you once knew, whom you thought long dead but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows what relief it may give to them, who knows how they may quicken in their chains, in their glass jars? You think it cool to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No, no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy is unbounded.

And so I say to you, tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.

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