Curated playlist
Modernist theatre
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
- Henrik IbsenHenrik Ibsen lay in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania, recovering from a series of strokes that had begun in March 1900. On the 22nd of May 1906, his nurse told a visitor he seemed a little better. Ibsen spluttered two words in…
- Bertolt BrechtBertolt Brecht walked out of a Congressional hearing in Washington on the 30th of October 1947, thanked by the committee chairman for his cooperation, and boarded a plane for Europe the very next morning. He never returned to the United…
- Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904 at the age of forty-four -- the same disease that had killed his brother claiming…
- Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill died the same way he was born: in a hotel room. As he whispered his last words at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston on the 27th of November 1953, he said, "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room." It…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy. He had planned to return to Oxford the following morning. Instead, he was buried five days later in the…
- Karel ČapekKarel Čapek died on Christmas Day, 1938, of pneumonia, and the Gestapo did not even know he was gone. Months later, Nazi agents arrived at his Prague home to arrest him. They found only his wife. That gap between the power of a regime and…
- Jean AnouilhJean Anouilh was born on the 23rd of June 1910 in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux. His father pressed fabric and thread into shape for a living; his mother, Marie-Magdeleine, played violin in a casino orchestra by…
- Luigi PirandelloLuigi Pirandello arrived in Rome on a hard, rainy night and felt, by his own account, that his heart was being crushed. Then he laughed, like a man in the throes of desperation. That desperate laugh became a key to everything he would…
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match the model of his pistol. Neighbors reported hearing two shots, not one. Ten days…
- Sergei EisensteinSergei Eisenstein arrived in Hollywood in May 1930 with a contract worth $100,000 and an invitation from Paramount Pictures to make a film in the United States. He had already directed two of the most celebrated silent films in history. He…
- Natalia GoncharovaNatalia Goncharova was born on the 3rd of July 1881, the same year as Picasso and Fernand Leger, in the small village of Nagaevo in what is now the Chernsky District of Tula Oblast. That coincidence of birth years was no accident of fate.…