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07 Oct ' 12:14
moved to a new site earlier in 2010.You can click through to it above, or you will be redirected there in 10 seconds.
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28 Jun ' 16:23
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01 Jun ' 21:28
Tuesday, 01 June 2010
A home of its own
Superfluities Redux is moving to its own domain today: www.superfluitiesredux.com. All future posts will appear there, though this site will remain online for the foreseeable future.
This constitutes an easier way to find this blog and the material that I've developed for it over the past seven years, and also something of a rededication to its originating principles, as I explain in today's premiere post. I will look forward to your continuing participation and readership.
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27 May ' 13:09
Thursday, 27 May 2010
"Are plays proper literature?"
... asks David Jays in today's Guardian. I'm rather with "zauberberg" in the comments section when she or he says, "I find the very fact that this question is posed baffling."
But more, they'd pretty damn well be literature or the May 2010 issue of Theater journal from the Yale School of Drama is a waste of so much pulp and ink. This new issue specifically addresses the current status of play-
as- text or vice versa, featuring new performance texts from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Romeo and Juliet) and Big Art Group (SOS), as well as essays by editor Tom Sellar, Juliana Francis Kelly, Jacob Gallagher- Ross and Karinne Keithley. I suppose I provide my own response to Jays' question in my own contribution to the issue, "The Booking of the Play" — about six thousand words of it, I think, and only available to paying customers there, or on your local newsstands now. But in brief: are plays proper literature? Of course they are, and capable of being interpreted from a variety of valid standpoints as readers: for entertainment, for study, for formal qualities. It's just that, like novels, poems and other forms, sometimes they're very poor proper literature indeed.
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24 May ' 12:08
Monday, 24 May 2010
In conversation
Those who were unable to attend the 10 May Howard Barker at the Segal Center event can now listen online to "A Conversation with Howard Barker," conducted by Prof. David Ian Rabey of the University of Aberystwyth, at theatreVOICE. The hour-
long discussion is divided into two parts: part one ("about history, abandoning social realism, and creating new definitions of political theatre") is , and part two ("about tragedy, working with actors, and the ethics of directing") is here. There is also a question- and- answer session that concludes part two. -
21 May ' 15:59
Friday, 21 May 2010
Books: Essays by Wallace Shawn
On the late lamented television
show Murphy Brown, Wallace Shawn occasionally guest-starred in the role of Stuart Best, a former newsman who was occasionally invited to deliver short, whimsical, observational essays in the high- pitched whine for which Shawn is perhaps best known. His vacuous, folksy, cheery commentaries, utterly devoid of content and which always ended with a broad smile, shrug and the cheery admission "That's all's I know!" would eventually drive Murphy into homicidal furies that would almost lead to her leaping across the desk to strangle him. Shawn's own commentaries in Essays, written over a twenty year period and recently collected between hard covers, are not as bad as all that. His meditations here on politics in the first half of the book and theatre in the second are deeply-
felt considerations of the intersections between public and private morality, and Shawn makes few concessions even when he considers his own capacity for violence and injustice. But, like David Mamet's prose style in , it partakes (like Shawn's style in dialogue) in that quality that I identified as a failing of American writing about theatre in general: Our family was privileged, but it was carefully explained to me that we were not rich, only "middle class," and so, oddly, I would need to "work for my living" rather than just receiving it automatically — in other words, the little package that was the life I'd evitably possess would be waiting for me in the baggage room with my name written on it, but, annoyingly, it wouldn't be delivered to the house, I'd have to get into a taxi and go get it.
Despite this, I grew up lazy, and I've stayed lazy. I've always like to eat ice cream and cake, and the line of least resistance for me has always been close to the border of sleep. What I was nine or ten, I kept an enormous mound of comic books on the floor of my bedroom, and my favorite thing was to burrow into my mound, find myself a comfortable position there, and in this wonderful swamp, which was also readable, I would reach a state that fell exactly midway between reading and napping.
This excerpt is selected almost at random from the first half of the book, on politics, in which the policies of the Bush and Clinton administrations are excoriated for their global brutality, and Shawn's honesty in confronting his status as a member of the leisure class in an advanced Western democracy is entirely welcome. But because the stakes he discusses are so high, this "that's all's I know" quality becomes, at times, problematic. Charles McNulty in his Los Angeles Timesreview of the book called Shawn's tone "Pollyannaish," but that's not the worst of it: "[C]omplicated questions are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles from the search for truth. There's something bracing about this when it works. But when it doesn't — which is about one-third of the time in this collection ... — it can seem as though reductive cliches are being replaced with tendentious caricatures." Perhaps McNulty had this passage about Bush in mind:
The love of killing is inside each one of us, and we can never be sure that it won't come out. We have to be grateful if it doesn't come out. In fact, it is utterly wrong for me to imagine that Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not. I am potentially just as much of a killer as he is. ... But we can't deny that Bush and his men, for whatever reason, are under the sway of the less peaceful side of their natures. From the first days after the World Trade Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be to be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they were in fact loving it. Those faces glowed. ...
Which, for all's I know, might be true. But it's just this tendentiousness that makes the first half of the book sometimes grating reading, even when you agree with the man. Because those stakes are higher, so should be the discourse: the reader balks that things might not be as simple as all that, an observation with which Noam Chomsky (whose interview with Shawn appears in this volume) famously trounced William F. Buckley in a 1969 debate.
Shawn is much better in the second half of Essays when he discusses the art form to which he has devoted his life, the theatre. Like David Mamet (the anti-
Shawn, perhaps), Shawn has created a body of work unique in the American theatre as well: plays which explore and examine the nexus of morality and amorality in both the public and private spheres. Human viciousness emerges in a variety of characters and private situations, especially those that are most intimate: a bickering married couple (Marie and Bruce, which will be revived this winter by The New Group); the personal and almost erotic relationship between an older woman who defends America's right to bomb Cambodia and an impressionable, innocent younger woman (Aunt Dan and Lemon); and especially Shawn's masterpiece to date, The Designated Mourner, an elegy for the decline of culture in the midst of barbarism and that culture's responsibility for it. In this play as well as in his most recent, Grasses of a Thousand Colors (which regrettably does not have a New York premiere date yet), Shawn eases his characters and thoughts into a dystopia of the near future, narrated from the distance of time by those responsible for those dystopias; their monologues, which crawl and twine back upon themselves, say far more about our oral culture of rationalization than any other plays of our time. And, as Mamet has his own theories on the status and decline of American theatre in his time, so does Shawn. Shawn's diagnosis is perhaps more persuasive because more broad-
reaching: ... the people who would ultimately hear what I had to say were the theatre-
goers. And who were the theatre- goers? In my country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the European continent, for example. ... The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre simply didn't arise. And as for those who, somehow, had gone to see a play or two — well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. ... So the theatre-
goers in the United States — the loyal followers of theatre, the ones who, despite everything, loved the theatre — the theatre- goers were an odd little circle, a funny old group. Not the sophisticates, one would have to say. Not people who listened to Hugo Wolf or George Crumb or Charlie Parker on their evenings off from the theatre. Not the aesthetes, with their well- worn copies of Kawabata and George Herbert. And, of course, not anyone who was poor or desperate or hungry or oppressed, because theatre is only for the middle class. ... No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-
century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine's ballets? Frederick Wiseman's documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico's frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day's newspaper, my own life? No one cared. In the corner of the universe where I'd be writing, there'd been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that behaviorists would consider the only possible system of teaching a dog or a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally free.
I quote at length like this because Shawn's prose style, like his monologues, turns back on itself and reveals, deliberately, more than the surface intends, and this takes time (both The Designated Mourner and Grasses clock in at two-and-a-half hours or longer). Shawn's drama draws in his interests in aesthetics and philosophy and recapitulates them as detail in the turn of a phrase.
As also suspected, Shawn is at his best in writing about sex in the theatre, particularly his own. Like Mamet, he saves the best for last, and in "Writing About Sex," the final essay of the volume, he reveals the power of sex and drama to provide an exemplar of contemplation and self-
invention in the midst of a growing authoritarian culture. "Sex seems capable of creating anarchy," he writes, "and those who are committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably either standing in opposition to it, or occasionally trying to pretend to themselves that it doesn't even exist. My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people ... because if it contained such images it couldn't be the New York Times, it couldn't present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world ... which it's the function of the New York Times to present every day. ... The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know. ... [Sex is] a symbol of the possibility that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient columns in which we march." Like David Mamet's , Shawn's Essays is also a maddening and enlivening read: for many different reasons, perhaps. But it too defines a lack of a certain concept for drama on the American stage, and the centrality of this drama to the culture in which it's produced (or unproduced, as the case may be). Between these two books can be gleaned a shimmer of those ideas and experiences that remain absent from the American art of the theatre.
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19 May ' 16:42
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Openings: Ben Brantley on That Face
In the comments section of yesterday's post on the New York opening of Polly Stenham's That Face, Aaron Riccio wrote that its New York reception "[doesn't have] anything to do with the Enron divide, though. This isn't a symbolic or showy production; it's a dismally effective glimpse at how illness affects a family." Well, hell, Ben Brantley thinks it does, in his New York Times of the play today:
That Face created a sensation when it hit London several years ago, moving quickly from the Royal Court Theater to a West End run. The excitement was generated partly by the youth of its author, who was only 19 at the time. ... That Face also opened at a time when the newspapers were full of lamentations about the sorry state of British youth, and it was a good moment for a "blame the elders" play, written by an enterprising younger person.
As the recent Broadway failure of the West End smash Enron reminded us, the tastes of London and New York theatergoers are not always in sync. And Manhattan audiences may be less eager to embrace That Face, especially the cripplingly self-conscious version directed by Sarah Benson. ...
Perhaps Ms. Benson, who did a smashing job with the New York premiere of Sarah Kane's Blasted, is trying to tone down the play's more flamboyant aspects, the better for us to see the wounded souls behind the fireworks. But without a Martha who tears up the stage, the play starts to look like a series of unconvincing poses, a problem compounded by the stiffness that can afflict American actors doing posh British accents.
Don't blame me; I didn't start it, though perhaps given what I mentioned about accents in my post yesterday I should set up shop as a prognosticator of New York Times theatre reviews.
I'm not sure what's more condescending about this review: Brantley's call for a "moratorium" on plays about crazy moms (though he doesn't seem to have a problem with those who sing, as his admiration for GypsyNext to Normal attests) or his recent explicitly parochial disdain for new British plays, especially by teenaged playwrights with a bone to pick with their parents.
Brantley is right that the mother-
child relationship is a central thematic element in theatre, as it is in the other arts, for it is central to human experience. When mental illness and class issues infest this relationship, drama arises, as it should; perhaps Brantley believes that, only at a safe historical distance (Medea, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie to name just three plays), it becomes more palatable, even amusing and entertaining when the mad mother is Ethel Merman. It is neither, either on stage or off. Which just makes me more interested in seeing That Face, though my time and my $75.00 must be spent when I'm not at my day job in raising my growing family and buying diapers. It's fine that he didn't like the play; but perhaps he should have just left it at that, instead of providing more grist for the blogospheric mill, as it likely will.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Upcoming: That Face
UPDATE: The Observer's Hermione Hoby interviews Polly Stenham on the New York opening of her first play here
The Manhattan Theatre Club production of Polly Stenham's That Face, directed by Sarah Benson, is currently in previews, and should be an interesting test-
case scenario in the recent London/New York debates that surrounded Enron's failure on Broadway. Stenham's first play, written when she was 19 years old, was nominated for one of Britain's highest honors, the Olivier Award, and according to Alison Croggon's recent review of the Melbourne, Australia, premiere, the play has a particularly British perspective: There's an unspoken history [lying beneath the play] that is still playing out in Britain. In his unfond memoir of his prep school St Cyprians, George Orwell described the brutalities of his middle class boarding school as a training ground for the front troops of Empire, fostering the lack of empathy and Darwinian competitiveness necessary for ordering around, and possibly shooting, the brown people who lived in the pink bits of the map. Another association, more telling perhaps in its poignancy, is from Michael Apted's 7-Up series: the unhappy middle class teenager Suzy, devastated by her parents' divorce, introvertedly twirling her hair as her pet dog chases and kills a rabbit in the background.
This resonance simply doesn't translate to Australia: yes, we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here. We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.
Will it be perceived as "an enclosed family psychodrama" here, whatever the accents that Benson decides upon? Maybe. And though Alison points out that the play's power rests in "its precise observations of a family locked in the crisis of mental illness," you won't find that in the publicity materials for the MTC production, which describe the play's plot as "a powerful and darkly comic look at an affluent family in freefall. Mia has been suspended from boarding school. Her brother, Henry, has dropped out altogether. And Martha, their mum, manipulates them all. Money can no longer fix their problems — now it's up to them" — not a mention of mental illness to be found (or, for that matter, class upheaval, though there's the glamour of money to be sure) and more, indeed, an "enclosed family psychodrama" among the affluent. Never mind the director; the press material has it simplified from the start. Is the play's Martha a "a fragile, damaged creature teetering wildly on the edge of a catastrophe curve," as Alison describes her, or a "Real Housewife of Contemporary Great Britain"? Is there a significant difference? The production will tell.
Monday, 17 May 2010
Books: Theatre by David Mamet
There he is, dressed in blue jeans
and work boots, lazing about on the comfortable seats of a commercial
theatre and surrounded by velvet drapery: David Mamet, theatrical pugilist
and provocateur, who has just distilled the wisdom of his four
decades in the American theatre into , a series of
short essays that display what he believes he has learned about acting,
directing, the commerical and non-commercial theatre, and the world itself, in a spare 155 pages. In the fifteen years between 1982 and 1997, Mamet wrote some of what are indisputably classics of the American theatre. Edmond, The Old Neighborhood — all of them testimony to a unique imagination and unstinting concentration on the elements of drama. These plays, like the best drama, resist closure, education and comfort and grow like crystals in the mind's eye with each engagement. Remorselessly and unsentimentally, Mamet stripped the veneer from the lies that believers in the American dream hold in common.
Then, a few years ago, somebody apparently slipped Mamet a copy of The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek's analysis of the failings of the socialist dream and the possibilities of the free-
market economy, and Mamet took an about- face from an explicit apoliticism to a firm stance in favor of laissez-faire libertarianism, a change announced in his 2008 essay "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain- Dead Liberal.'" Theatre, perhaps of necessity, displays elements of both the artist and the polemicist, leading to an infuriating and maddening book in which what is given on one page is taken away on the next."The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-
market economy," Mamet writes on page 64 in an essay called "Politically Correct." "The theatre especially exemplifies the dramatic free market in that interactions between playgoer and presenter, between consumer and purveyor, are immediate, unfettered, not subject to regulation. ... There is an immediate feedback between parties to the transaction, and each will maneuver until he has achieved his particular end ... without recourse to logical, verifiable position statements. The interactions of the theatre, a free- market institution, resemble thus not a legal proceeding but a wrestling match. ... It is the province not of ideologues ... but of show folk trying to make a living." Mamet's prose style is of that faux-naïf quality found to a disturbing degree in American writings about theatre and American drama itself, perhaps Our Town being the most faux example of this naïvete. His targets in many of the essays here are ideology, especially the communitarian ideology of the contemporary American non-
profit theatre, and theory, especially the diluted psychologism of the American directing tradition. And he is right — so far as he goes. But his blind spot here is that he neglects to acknowledge that laissez- faire free-market libertarianism is every bit as much a political ideology as that of the socialist or communist dream. This ideology can be used as much as an instrument of corruption and crime as can those of the left, as the recent financial shenanigans in the U.S., and now abroad, are attesting. The fact is that the motives of those who promulgate any ideology are never simon-
pure. Mamet may no doubt agree with William Goldman's assertion that, in the theatre business as in film, "Nobody knows anything" — nobody knows what play will succeed or fail, but decisions must be made as to which plays appear on stages, on the Broadway stage as well as in the smallest black- box theatre south of 14th Street. Informing those decisions are prejudices and ultimately power — who has the money or influence to determine what choices any given audience member will have when he scans the theatre listings in preparation for the weekend. This is the broken hinge in the libertarian ideology: while celebrating choice, the libertarians deny that this choice is limited by what the producers believe will attract the largest audience, and in these decisions as to what to include in a season, or even between book covers, they engage in a kind of cultural authoritarianism as well. This is the argument for subsidized theatre — another target of Mamet's wrath — but it is in this subsidized theatre that audiences may first engage with that work that may be uncommercial in the contemporary political climate, and what happens on those stages may, in time, end up on Broadway. As did, indeed, the work of Tony Kushner and some playwrights who engage in writing what Mamet castigates as "victim plays." "This play ... has a quantifiable meaning (such and such a group are oppressed, and well-
meaning people must learn to overcome their prejudice and come to their aid), but it is a meaning that panders to the lowest in the audience (See how smart you are? I, the author, am proud of you), and ejects the audience both feeling self- righteous and having ratified its potential for violence (How could that vicious school mistress not have seen that the deaf are people too? Why, I'd like to ...). These issue plays, then, are a mild form of propaganda, not putting forth the views of the state but, perhaps more dangerously, positing the existence of and recruiting for that group greater than the state: the confraternity of the right thinking. This invitation is potentially the mild beginning of fascism." As I said, maddening, even if not entirely wrong — more maddening in that Mamet in this book often engages in a kind of broad, slapdash thinking about groups of people — the "victims," the "capitalists," the "oppressors" — not unlike that of the playwrights and ideologues he criticizes. Mamet has it in for "intellectuals" generally (though he acknowledges at the end of his book his "indebtedness" to Thomas Sowell, Paul Johnson, Friedrich Hayek and others — all these are intellectuals too, but apparently the right kind of intellectuals), but worse, he posits that amorphous "audience," this mass which must be entertained, coddled and attracted. But there is no audience; audience is a fiction, an abstraction. In truth, they are individuals who are attracted or not attracted, engaged or not engaged, by a play; it is a matter of numbers, not of the abstract monster the audience. One gets the sinking feeling that in trying to make this audience happy, Mamet fears it: fears that he will be found wanting, a failure, if his play does not meet with economic success. For the man who wrote the character of Shelley Levene, this should be an awakening, and a warning.
And then there are minor aspects of the book which would be laughable if ... well, they're just laughable, really. Next to Our Town, The Front Page is Mamet's favorite American play; though he castigates Eugene O'Neill's plays as museum pieces, he doesn't seem to mind the rolltop-
desk- slamming farce and dated "sweetie, get me rewrite" dialogue of this otherwise perfectly respectable comedy. And my own personal favorite is "Let us leave T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and all the other quitters who preferred Europe" — a jingoistic bone-headed locution, especially inappropriate for those Americans who courageously chose to practice their art in a threatening, already war- ravaged Europe rather than an isolationist United States, that makes Glenn Beck look like George Orwell. David Mamet's is just as enlightening about the state of American drama and theatre as was Outrageous Fortune earlier this year — perhaps moreso, since it comes from a man who is undoubtedly one of the great American postwar playwrights. He is right and wrong, constantly contradictory, and infuriating: all to the good, I think. On page 68, Mamet writes:
Consider, in opposition, pseudodramas, mixed media, performance art, agitprop, and other suggestions that there exists a politically correct view, and that the correct venue for such a view's airing is the dramatic arena.
These essentially meaningless spectacles, again, invite the audience (self-
selected by the political views the members hold) to bask in a celebration of the death of meaning. They do not explore human interaction (the task of drama), which is to say, they do not investigate in order to arrive at a conclusion, but begin with a conclusion (capitalism, America, men, and so on, are bad) and award [sic] the audience for applauding its agreement. And on the final page:
The mystery in drama is time: how to use time, how to exploit the human perception of time and its ordering into cause and effect. The rejection of this intolerable burden, our human specialty, is the goal of the religious mystic, the yogi, the lover, and the drug addict — to live in a world without time, to achieve unbeing.
The examination of this urge and its avowal and the confession of its tragic impossibility is the subject of all drama.
I'd like to see David Mamet try to sell that to a Broadway producer; and I have no doubt that he believes in those words as much as he does the economic theories of Milton Friedman, for he gives them pride of place as the conclusion of his book. Nonetheless, that a dramatist's thought can hold both concepts in an equilibrium — and fascinating, enthralling concepts they are — argues for his continued importance to an American drama that needs just such blooded, pugilistic, even grossly pig-
headed at times thinking and writing.
Terry Teachout briefly discussed the book in last Friday's Wall Street Journalhere.
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14 May ' 22:20
Friday, 14 May 2010
Richard Foreman speaks
Richard Foreman, who recently confirmed that he will be leaving theatrical work for that of film, speaks to Morgan van Prelle Pecelli about his decision, his final stage production Idiot Savant, and a variety of other subjects in a lengthy interview in Reality Sandwich.
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13 May ' 12:19
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Charles Spencer on David Mamet
I hope to write about David Mamet's short book of essays Theatre in the next few weeks; it's a maddening, insightful and contradictory work of considerable interest. In the meantime, there is this review of the book by Charles Spencer in the 30 April issue of the Telegraph. Spencer writes:
There isn't one David Mamet, but two of the blighters. Artistically speaking he has a split personality.
On the one hand there is Macho Dave, much given to lean, mean, strongly plotted confrontational plays in which foul language is used with the brutal impact of a sawn-
off shotgun while somehow achieving a kind of street poetry. When Mamet is in this mode there are few living American dramatists to touch him for theatrical excitement as plays like American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna have proved. But buried inside Macho Dave, who loves hunting and loathes political correctness, there is Sensitive David who writes artily attenuated plays that are as insubstantial as they are pretentious and painful memoirs of his childhood in Chicago. ...
... [Amid] all the attacks on fakery and his robust Right-
wing insistence that subsidy sucks and the theatre is the perfect model of the free market economy, one suddenly catches a fleeting glimpse of Sensitive David, when he declares, for instance, that the theatrical interchange is a communion between the audience and God, moderated by a play or litany constructed by the dramatist. That seems a long way from his assertion that the only purpose of theatre is to entertain a paying audience but then one of the most fascinating things about Mamet, both as playwright and polemicist, is that he has the confidence of his own contradictions.
That Mamet "has the confidence of his own contradictions" is apt and well-
put, though I can't agree on Spencer's dismissal of some of "Sensitive David's" more aesthetically ambitious work as "artily attenuated," "pretentious" and "insubstantial"; they are, on the contrary, remarkably complex plays. Discussing these plays in the introduction to the fourth volume of the Methuen collected Mamet, the playwright says that "Considerations of form fascinate me," and describes The Cryptogram, Oleanna, American Buffalo and The Woods as "classical tragedies ... all written in free verse." His further thoughts on tragedy in the same volume illuminate some of what he writes in Theatre, and encourage me to go back to read some of these plays from a writer who, despite his Broadway productions, seems to be a more and more elusive and ambiguous figure. Sheer bloody- mindedness is of little interest, but there's more than that to Mamet, however much one may disagree with his current ideology. -
09 May ' 22:37
Sunday, 09 May 2010
Howard Barker at the Segal Center
I hope you'll be able to join the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and theatre minima for tomorrow, Monday 10 May, beginning at 1.00pm. The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature a variety of screenings, readings and performances to celebrate the four-
decade- long- and- counting career of dramatist, director, poet and polemicist Howard Barker. The Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue between 34th and 35th Streets in New York, and a full schedule for the day is at the theatre minima Web site here. I look forward to joining you in welcoming Barker on a rare visit to our shores.
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