Paintings by Jasper Johns, from left: Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963; Flag, 1958; Winter, 1986 (all photographs by Jamie M. Stukenberg / Professional Graphics Inc. Jasper Johns, a South Carolina native currently residing in Connecticut, first came to New York City in 1949 when he (briefly) attended Parsons School of Design. In 1954 he painted his first flag picture, and by 1958 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Today, The......

THEATER: We saw Fiona Shaw in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days on Saturday and highly recommend it. Shaw is mesmerizing in her performance as Winnie, crystallizing in her 90-minute virtuoso performance all the desperation, self-delusion and absurdity of an entire lifetime. (Her little-seen costar Tim Potter is also a hoot as Willie.) The production is as bitterly funny as it is affecting, and, as a metaphor, the blasted landscape that devours Winnie is as potent as......

In Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, a decidedly upbeat woman named Winnie spends Act One striving valiantly to make the best of her sticky situation: she’s irrevocably buried up to her waist in a “low mound.” True, Winnie has her reticent companion Willie for company, but she cheerily defies the barren void by holding forth for a seemingly nonexistent gathering of spectators. And Act Two finds Winnie still determined to make a go of......

The most exciting story in New York theater this year had nothing to do with the Broadway stagehands' strike, it was the vibrant growth of what used to be called “experimental theater”, a movement that can now really only loosely be defined by what it’s not: non-naturalistic and not made for TV, with an emphasis on bold physicality, collaboration and, sometimes, multimedia. This aesthetically diverse body of work is generally classified as Off-Off-Broadway (some dub......

In case you haven’t been counting down, today marks the beginning of the New York International Fringe Festival, the country’s largest theatre festival! Though ten years is typically the amount of time people say one needs to be in New York before being a “New Yorker,” the Fringe Festival has had such an impact on the downtown Broadway theatre scene that, were it a human, it probably would have attained resident status without anything near......

Tomorrow is Bloomsday, the day chronicled in James Joyce's Ulysses. And for the 25th year, Symphony Space has a full Bloomsday on Broadway celebration, focusing on "on Mr. Leopold Bloom's spiritual son, Stephen Dedelus (aka James Joyce), with readings from Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners." The events start at noon tomorrow, and the final performance is the inimitable Fionnula Flanagan reading Molly Bloom's monologue (aka, "The Fully Molly") at 10PM till whenever she......

Here at Gothamist theater, we tend to let the weather affect our views on shows to see more than is perhaps logical, though when there’s so much to see, at least it gives us some way of deciding. Anyway, this being the case, naturally outdoor shows have a special place in our heart, and this week one of (if not the absolute) the first outdoor shows is on: the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s The Bass Saxophone,......

Bill Irwin, Actor...

As part of their Playwrights & Performers series, the Drama Book Shop plays host to the happy couple behind Thom Pain (based on nothing), playwright Will Eno and actor James Urbaniak. Now extended through Labor Day, Thom Pain (based on nothing) has won over a host of critics and took top honors at 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. With the extended run Gothamist hopes to catch a performance soon. But we have such a fondness for......