Saturday, May 04, 2013

Being Walt Disney: Lucas Hnath and the Theater of Celebrity - The Brooklyn Rail:

These experiments with language are in the tradition of writers who are dear to Hnath—Caryl Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and Maria Irene Fornes. He also once spent a road trip listening to Mike Daisey monologues, which “seeped in,” inspiring some of the repetition, the whirling back over key ideas to build a kind of incantatory poetry. These influences—with the added fodder of growing up in a charismatic church where congregants spoke in tongues—creates a unique Hnathian vocabulary that demands exceptional dexterity from his actors.
Fortunately, this play is in expert hands.