Tag: theater
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Rehearsing lines
Catalina Florina Florescu Hoboken, New Jersey, United States Coffee Queen. Iulia Şchiopu. Permission granted by artist. CHARACTERS: Eve Ana TIME AND SETTING: Now, here. Two women are seated on a bench. That’s all you need to know. Plus that their name is a palindrome. Mirrored names. Make what you want out of this. …
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Bad blood: The drama of bloodshed
Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland In some professions, bloodstained clothing is a normal part of the job. The two jobs that come to mind principally are a butcher and a vascular surgeon, although the latter would probably prefer not to be associated with the former! In vascular surgery not every operation results in bloodstained scrubs, although for…
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Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet
Sarah Bahr Indianapolis, Indiana, United States John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, Tate Britain, London. In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the…
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Bigger than a black box
Valeri Lantz-Gefroh Texas, United States Teaching in very different classrooms – at the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and dozens of top medical schools, hospitals, and universities. I am an actor, director, and acting teacher. And my theater is a medical school in Texas. “Wait, what?” My life in the last…
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Margaret Edson’s W;t: lessons on person-centered care
Atara Messinger Toronto, Ontario, Canada “She slips off her bracelet. She loosens the ties and the top gown slides to the floor.” American playwright Margaret Edson’s 1998 play W;t has been described as “ninety minutes of suffering and death mitigated by a pelvic exam and a lecture on seventeenth-century poetry.”1 When W;t was…
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“Breath of life you’ll be to me”—The portrayal of tuberculosis in the opera La Traviata
Judith WagnerMunich, Germany The white half-round of the stage is illuminated with an eerie blue light. The only prop is a large clock on the right-hand side. A dark figure is seated beside it. The door on the left opens and the heroine—clad all in red—enters the stage. Strings accompany her appearance with a low…
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Anatomical ghosts in The Merchant of Venice
Mauro Spicci Antonio and the dangers of self-diagnosis In the last few years the steadily growing number of attempts to read Shakespeare’s plays from a medical perspective has been justified by the idea that they are not simply the immortal fruits of a genius, but also documents reflecting the historical, cultural, and social background of…