Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

Novelist, Arts Critic, Management Consultant, Investor pittsburghquarterly.com/category/hamle… Pittsburgh, PA Joined January 2015

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

"His Teach is the guy in shop class who thought he was a player, but wears passé clothing and cheesy facial hair, the kind of guy who knew more about cars than women, but always confused the two. He’s a Stanley Kowalski transmogrified by the 1970s. . ." shorturl.at/jrEQ9

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

"We feel as if we’re witnessing a Cortázar or Borges tale — that is a story-within-a-story which jumps between narration and action sans caesura, like the snappy dialogue of a Howard Hawks film." shorturl.at/fmnq7

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

"The staging creates the dilemma of how to reproduce the inner emotions of these characters in such a copious landscape. It’s like watching a psychiatric patient lying on a Freudian couch shouting to his analyst across a football field." shorturl.at/delFI

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

Weiss focuses on the universal idea of pathos with the goal of eliciting our empathy — through a greater understanding of the human condition — instead of merely our grief. shorturl.at/ixEHR

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

The most impactful moments combine dance -- partnering real figures with projected ones -- as if the beats are flowing through bodies and catching themselves on the translucent screens, like cartoon souls shot out of their flesh. bit.ly/42VlfHt

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

Watching PBT's latest production, “Balanchine and Beyond,” reminded me of the first time I saw the work of the visionary film director Sergei Eisenstein, and encountered cinematography as a form of rapture, instead of the mere recording of imagery. bit.ly/3LkX120

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

2 years ago

Director Jean-Luc Godard famously called the creative youth of the 1960s, “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” After seeing this play, I would say his comment is still relevant, but would call this generation “the children of Marx and Apple Computer.” bit.ly/3HsOAR5

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"This may explain the zombie-like character of many pieces in the show, which do not seem to live without the flesh of elucidation. Not a good requirement for visual art." bit.ly/3Mk2pEp #art

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

Directing is kind of like drumming: if you don’t have a good drummer, you won’t have a good band. @AugustWilson bit.ly/3XQaaEd

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"It’s like watching the evolution of Picasso’s Blue to Rose Periods envelope the world around you in a neon fog." bit.ly/3YBiQ2j

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"The mundane and the banal are often a misprision for the inscrutable, and this is one of the greatest strengths playwrights can manifest – letting the audience interpret what it sees without the overbearing presence of the creator." bit.ly/3DkjIzR

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"Much of the dialogue – written in modern English, not a parody of baroque French – flies by: clotted, trenchant, and witty, but it’s never garbled, rarely stepped on, and recalls the verbal acrobatics of cinematic screwball comedies. . ." bit.ly/3wJ2xEo

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"This family, if it could be called that, makes the families in Sam Shepard plays look like the Brady Bunch. Hamm calls his father “accursed progenitor!” which is about the closest to a term of endearment he can muster." bit.ly/3WO6XES

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"The characters live in the kind of flat emotional interiority typically found in the films of Robert Bresson – for example, “Diary of a Country Priest” — not the heightened gesticulating archness of classical opera." bit.ly/3Rvi98t

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

3 years ago

"Great art is great because of its strength — not its moralism, even less so its authorship — and strong art is that which most achieves the sublime." bit.ly/3jbJLm4

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

4 years ago

FitzGerald, as Jacques, becomes the character he is portraying with immeasurable nuance. His “All the world’s a stage” speech is revelatory in its lack of pretension: he delivers it to the audience as if he’s handing it a baby he doesn’t want to startle. bit.ly/3C77yqW

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

4 years ago

He's punched in the testicles repeatedly by the female characters, in the manner of a boxer hitting a speedbag. It gets a good laugh, but the Freudian implications of the playwright’s intent are obvious: This isn’t Fantasy Island, it’s Feminist Island. bit.ly/3Hevdta

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

4 years ago

It would be easy to portray such a man as a fiendish cartoon, but we see a more Freudian unspooling of his maniacal, robber baron ethos, which we can relate to as an archetype of the modern, rapacious tech billionaire. bit.ly/37slHSs #thecurrentwar

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Stuart Sheppard @HamletsMachine

5 years ago

Dr. Hirsch achieves a redemptive denouement in poem after poem without becoming maudlin, like a sanguine Virgil ushering us through a dark path to our own unknowable end. bit.ly/3p34yWl