The art of Butoh, exhaustively explored in the New York Butoh Festival this month and last at several New York locations, including Japan Society, has always seemed a ferociously intense theater-dance form with an unyielding grip on life, death and other themes.
"It's the same plays but different audiences," said the intense, chain-smoking theater manager.
Friday's Juliet, Hye-Min Hwang, makes the solo an even more intense moment of theater with her abandon and her broken lyricism.
When it officially opened as a play in October 2002, Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, called it "thoroughly involving theater," "intense and deeply affecting".
As successful as the extended run of "Blasted" has been, Ms. Benson and the cast have mulled how such an intense piece of theater would be received in a commercial production, and whether it could fill a larger house than the 74 seats at Soho Rep.
In Russia, where theatrical experimentation flourished in the early 20th century, the end of Communism has spawned intense new interest in theater despite the economic troubles plaguing most theaters.
Lee loved travel, art, music, theater and intense discussion, and inspired her children and grandchildren to embrace the world.
The controversy that followed was intense enough that the theater organized a mock trial of the director, Leopold Jessner, Habima and Shakespeare.
The pressure was perhaps most intense at the Virginia Theater on the set of the Public Theater's "Wild Party," where the director and co-writer, George C. Wolfe, was juggling everything from the health of his cast to the length of his show.
Philip Roth's standing is currently higher than Updike's, thanks to an Indian summer of creativity (starting with Sabbath's Theater) so intense that his books should come with complimentary sunblock.
