Posts From Author: susan sarandon

Curtain Call: Inside the Lie

Seriously Entertaining is back! The first of our two shows this fall, Inside the Lie, hits City Winery on Monday, September 29, with a mind-expanding line-up of literary talent. Don’t have your tickets yet? Check out our writers below in an audiovisual preview of some of the pleasures that await you. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist specializing in particle cosmology. He’s also one of the great elucidators. Gleiser’s work is remarkably accessible, cracking open the hardest nuts of quantum physics and cosmology for the general reader. Books include The Prophet and the Astronomer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which investigates the ongoing search for meaning in the stars, and, most recently, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014). Read our review of The Island of Knowledge here, follow Marcelo on Twitter, and watch his Ted Talk on the origins of life here: John Guare‘s fifty-year career on the American stage and screen has been marked by some stunning highs, including the Tony Award-winning success of The House of Blue Leaves, Louis Malle’s classic 1980 movie Atlantic City, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and, more recently, A Free Man of Color (2010). Check out our survey of […]
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Six Degrees of John Guare

MERIWETHER [LEWIS] Never give up the enormity of this dream. Keep telling the lie. The United States will always be the last undiscovered terrain — even if we have to move the white spaces inside our head. Always hold out the promise that you can find your passage to the west, to whatever it is — love everlasting, bottomless wealth, glory — JACQUES CORNET Freedom. MERIWETHER That dream must never die. — John Guare, A Free Man of Color, Act 2 These lines, which arrive at the end of one of John Guare’s most recent plays, could be the perfect epigraph for his collected works. Desire for betterment, self-deluding ambition, holding out on a maybe: these unite Guare’s best-known characters, from Artie Shaughnessy in The House of Blue Leaves (1966) and Sally in Atlantic City (1980) to pretty much everyone in Six Degrees of Separation (1990), his most widely performed play. There are plenty of rogues in Guare’s work — con artists, thieves, drug dealers, aspiring terrorists — but they are defined less by their unsavory pursuits than their mastery of self-deception. His is a poetics of delusion. The House of Blue Leaves, which won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Obie for Best American Play […]
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The Politics of Sexual Identity: In Bed With Gore Vidal by Tim Teeman

To create categories is the enslavement of the categorized because the aim of every state is total control over the people who live in it. What better way is there than to categorize according to sex, about which people have so many hang-ups? — Gore Vidal This week I spoke to Tim Teeman about his book In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master (Magnus Books, 2013). Gore Vidal was born in 1925, made his name as a novelist in his early twenties, expanded his repertoire to encompass stage and screen, ran for Congress in the Hudson Valley (1960) and California (1982), and made countless friends and enemies in a long life that ended at the age of 86 in 2012. He’s most widely admired as an essayist (start with Selected Essays) and remembered fondly by those with a taste for the showbiz death-match as one of the heavyweights of talk-show controversy. When Vidal died he left behind him a whole deck of rumours and conflicting testimonies. Much of his work is about sex and sexuality, yet his attitudes towards gay liberation and his own sexuality were full of contradictions. This tension is the starting-point […]
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