The Tell-Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe

stage It’s opening night for The Tell-Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe, and things don’t look good for the Endstation Theatre Company, the troupe staging this dramatic analysis of the great Southern writer (and one-time UVA student) Edgar Allan Poe. The small, third-floor theater is far from overflowing—the audience outnumbers the seven-person cast by […]

Littlefoot

book A Zen monk senses death approaching, slowly stalking up the mountainside towards his temple. Languid and contemplative, the monk picks up a pen, unrolls a parchment and, like generations of monks before him, writes a jisei, a death poem. The jisei’s writer doesn’t dwell on death explicitly; he contemplates endings, the course of life, […]

“Women in Printmaking: A Variety Show”

art A solitary figure lies splayed out in a grassy field; an anonymous hand pickpockets a young girl as she helps a man collect his fallen groceries; a lonesome creek winds its way past the trunks of two dead trees bathed in moonlight.  Sounds disjointed, right?  These three scenes come from prints by Betty MacDonald, […]

The Savage Detectives

book Mexico City, late 1975: Crime is on the rise; the economy is starting to backslide; political upheaval looms on the horizon. This was a turbulent time for our southern neighbor’s capital. But, despite the chaos and uncertainty, it is a time marked by nostalgia, remembered fondly for its student uprisings and passionate popular protests. […]

The Book of Liz

stage Satire, it’s said, is a pretty mocking of life.  And satire is exactly the word to describe The Book of Liz, a play penned by the famed brother-sister duo of David and Amy Sedaris.  There’s little else you could call theater that puts on the same stage an Amish-like religious sect, a Colonial-themed chain […]

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

stage On April 23, William Shakespeare’s moldering corpse celebrated its 443rd year on this planet. The Bard’s body has little to hope for, besides one more year of slow decay. His body of work, on the other hand, can look forward to another year of life on stages around the world. One such stage is […]