An invented language, off-stage heroes, searing political comedy. Katarina Matsson sits down with award-winning Swedish playwright and novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri to discuss translation, the power-struggle of words, rats, germs, leaving home to write about it, and why hearing voices doesn’t necessarily mean you’re crazy.

A while back, we wrote about Elevator Repair Service’s performance of Gatz, in which The Great Gatsby is read in its entirety onstage.
Recently, Elevator Repair Service took on a different lit-meets-theatre project, which they called “Shuffle”: to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York Public Library, the group performed three great works of literature—The [...]

ast week, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark fired its director, Julie Taymor. Already the most expensive musical in Broadway history, Spider-Man has been universally panned by critics—and it hasn’t even officially opened yet.
The show’s decision to let Taymor go was apparently in part due to her refusal to alter the script, even [...]

Joshua Furst grapples with the human condition by creating characters on the edge. They inhabit the fringes of society, sanity and cultural norms, but remain incredibly grounded in a common American experience, with all its oddball rituals and quirks. In his conversation with Lee Thomas, he defends the merits of dissent, even when the dissidents self-destruct: “To dismiss them out of hand for those bad choices becomes, I think, in our public conversation, a way of dismissing the truth behind those choices.”

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I [...]

We’ve seen a lot of book adaptations lately, from Where the Wild Things Are to Precious to The Lovely Bones. Screenwriters and directors cut scenes here and add scenes there to transform the book into a cohesive viewing experience. A good adaptation can be a brand-new work of art. But in the [...]

NYC-based writers: On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM, head to the Rattlestick Theater to see a one-night only reading of Mulletfingers: Short Plays on Hands and Fingers by FWR contributor Brian Bartels. I was lucky enough to attend another night of Brian’s hilarious yet thought-provoking plays, Versus, in March, and the short pieces [...]