2/2
And yet he effectively makes his poetry that unfair yet desirable “ask.” For this poet writing poetry is a way of meeting the future, with an apology….Young Woman with a Cane is as accomplished as any book of poetry I have read in a while.

6/6
Image: LEXI VENTER as Bobo Fuller, EMBETH DAVIDTZ as Nicola Fuller, ROB VAN VUUREN as Tim Fuller in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Image: Coco Van Oppens. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

5/6
This is clearly perplexing to the feral child, dirt-smeared and snarl-haired, who smokes cigarettes on the sly, rides a motorbike, and appears to observe both societies, black and white, from the position of an outsider.

4/6
Bobo’s grandmother, a frightful old woman stashed in a nursing home with her wheelchair-bound husband, speechless from a stroke, assures the little girl that their family’s superior breeding sets them apart.

3/6
But playing with the African children on the farm, Bobo heedlessly imitates her mother’s imperious behavior, only to be scolded by Sarah. How should one behave, anyway?

2/6
Somewhere Bobo has heard the word “racist,” and she ponders on it. When she asks her mother whether they are racist, Nicola is scandalized. Certainly not, she says, though other people are.

4/4
Image: Lupita Nyong’o in the Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, directed by Saheem Ali, which reopened the revitalized Delacorte Theater and ran through September 14. Photo credit: Joan Marcus.

3/4
In that sense, Shakespeare in the Park remains what it always was: not an embalmed tradition, but a civic commitment renewed each summer, a wager that art—shared, elemental—can still summon a city to gather under the trees.

2/4
...Sixty-plus years after Papp first smuggled Shakespeare into the park, the Delacorte emerged from its renovation as a theater simultaneously new and timeless, ready once again to deliver blank verse to the open air.

3/3
Conrad has enchanted himself with Dickens during lockdown, had fun listing his favorite bits, and got an eminent publishing house to print it. Lucky him. If you love the sound of this, lucky you.

2/3
We all have our personal as well as professional deformations, and Dickens above all authors celebrates individual quirks. Conrad’s cast of mind is observant, connective, surging, and overflowing. What it is not is explanatory.

Image: Sara Mearns, Chun Wai Chan, and the Company in Alexei Ratmansky’s Paquita. Photo credit: Erin Baiano.

Image: Irina Starshenbaum in Shoshana. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.