Author: rakemag

Here’s a pairing with a curious backstory. Galway Kinnell, whose 1980 Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was touring in Northern England when he found himself at a reading by Josephine Dickinson, a deaf Oxford-educated poet, musician, composer, and teacher. More than a decade earlier, she had fallen in love with and married a sheep farmer more than twice her age. So struck was Kinnell by Dickinson’s poetry, most of which is set in England’s rugged Pennine Mountains, that he wrote an introduction for her American debut, Silence Fell, and helped get it into print. He’s also got his own new collection, Strong is Your Hold, and the duo will read from and discuss their work as the Talking Volumes program celebrates National Poetry Month. 651-290-1221; fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org

You’d suppose a writer has to be pretty damn good, not to mention lucky, to warrant dust-jacket blurbs from not one but two Nobel laureates. The U.S. publication of Laura Restrepo’s Delirium carries ringing endorsements from José Saramago and Latin American luminary Gabriel García Márquez, and also comes on the heels of a slew of international awards and acclaim. The story of an unemployed professor of literature who has been reduced to selling dog food for a living—how’s that for metaphor?—and is trying to pinpoint the origins of his wife’s sudden and mysterious descent into madness, Delirium is a literary mystery steeped in the crime and corruption of modern-day Colombia. Saramago has called it “one of the finest novels written in recent memory.”

Orson Welles did it, and Laurie Anderson, too. Now local director Jon Ferguson—best known for his 2005 hit, Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban—has taken up the challenge of adapting Melville’s epic for the stage. This is an undertaking that, he admits, could elude, haunt, and/or—much as with Captain Ahab—swallow him whole. Ferguson’s project got under way with the casting of clowns and dancers from physical theater circles as well as actors from more text-based traditions. With this range of performers, the show aims to capture both the powerful physicality and the amazing prose of the story. Intriguingly, a fully functional set involves ropes, planks, canvas, and pulleys, meaning that as the play production builds, so too will constructed images of the sea, the ship, and even the whale. 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

On the occasion of its fifth Walker-commissioned production, Britain’s Improbable Theatre abandons the relative safety of such lavish puppetry spectacles as Shockheaded Peter and The Hanging Man (performed here in 2000 and 2003, respectively) and instead harks back to its roots in scrappy, improvisational object theater. Animo, therefore, is not so much a play as it is a series of spontaneous performances. With no script—not even predetermined characters—Improbable will invent its show anew, every night; found objects collected from nooks and crannies around the Twin Cities will serve as puppets. Local performers are pitching in, too: The Animo cast includes Minneapolis’ master puppeteer Michael Sommers, Jeune Lune co-founder Barbra Berlovitz, Bedlam Theater’s Julian McFaul, burgeoning puppeteer Lindsay McCaw, and percussionist extraordinaire Aaron Barnell. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org

In this approximation of a true story, Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, the failed writer who conjured up the scam of … if not of the century, at least of the 1970s. Irving claimed to have interviewed Howard Hughes, co-written the recluse’s autobiography, and then walked off with a mint—until the aviator called him on it, that is, and Irving was sent to prison. Orson Welles covered the same story with his 1974 film F for Fake, a bizarre, wonderful, and virtually unwatched film. But with The Hoax, director Lasse Hallström takes a more conventional and humorous approach. Gere, whose comic sensibilities have never been given their due (he was the best thing in Chicago), looks as though he’s having a ball; the rest of the film is as light on its feet as such scam-artist classics as Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight and Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez team up to give us this two-and-a-half-hour pulp festival featuring two, count ’em, two turgid films shown back to back with faux-vintage trailers in between. The first is Rodriguez’s zombie flick Planet Terror, in which biological weapons are unleashed, sending scores of the undead to face … why, a one-legged stripper with a machine-gun prosthesis, of course. Tarantino’s Death Proof stars Kurt Russell as a gnarly stuntman who lures chicks into his car, taking them for countryside drives from which they never return. Grindhouse is gunning to be a lowbrow masterpiece. Then again, Rodriguez has proven to be an incredibly erratic director. As for Tarantino, his last work, Kill Bill, was overlong and uninteresting. And both forget that grindhouse theaters were typically drive-ins, whereat audience members could occupy themselves with groping and boozing as the third hour rolled on.