NOTE: On Thursday, April 26 at 9 a.m., The Utah Review will live blog the only live performance of Radio Hour Episode 12: Stand, produced by Plan-B Theatre and KUER-FM’s RadioWest program. Tune into KUER-FM 90.1 and follow The Utah Review during the broadcast. Utah playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett is impeccably an artist of Renaissance … Read more
When the play Jump opens, the audience is enjoying the pithy, rapid banter between Erick, the young confident skydiver (Matthew Sincell), and Phil (Darryl Stamp), a 60-year-old first-timer, as they prepare for the fateful jump from 12,000 feet above the ground. The audience laughs as Erick tries to ease the nerves of Phil, who rattles … Read more
Nearly nine years ago, Shirley Dygert, then in her mid-50s, went on her first tandem jump at the Skydive Houston drop zone in Texas. Her husband, who had plenty of thrilling experiences of his own as a cliff diver, stayed on the ground to photograph his wife’s first jump. As a 2014 Sports Illustrated feature … Read more
More than 50 years ago, Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation became one of her most famous and widely scrutinized writings. Sontag wrote in the last line of the essay, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” – a declaration that resonated in her deep admiration for Franz Kafka’s work and, in … Read more
In one of opera’s most famous and most captivating arias, Tosca sings Vissi d’arte, which translates literally to “I lived for art.” The aria from this Giacomo Puccini opera is an anguished prayer because Tosca, a singer, faces the most impossible choice. To save her lover (the painter Cavaradossi) from the death sentence, she must … Read more
It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to … Read more
In occupied France during World War II, writers and intellectuals did not approach the moral dilemma of collaboration and accommodation in a unifying response. A leading figure of the Resistance from the outset, Albert Camus edited an underground newspaper. But, Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux, while sympathetic to the Resistance efforts and contributing anti-Nazi content, … Read more
Two local masters of minimalistic theater are staging plays about children this fall — though stark contrasts in treatment. One is a macabre junk opera take on old German stories about children who misbehave or refuse to follow sound advice. The other is a new play about two siblings grieving over the loss of their … Read more
Why does it have to get dark? Why can’t the day always stay? Let’s say goodbye to the night time, Goodbye. Let’s send the dark time away. Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Some Things I Don’t Understand, 1968 In a 1970 episode of his legendary public television series Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Fred Rogers reflected on … Read more
While the bomb-throwers—both metaphorical and literal – invariably claim to speak for the locals, most of the locals I’ve met prefer to speak for themselves. They’re old-timers and newcomers, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. They’re scientists, tribal members, ranchers, and telecommuters, often more than one of the above. Some criticize the federal government, and … Read more