“One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

John Updike, “Confessions of a Wild Bore”

The Modern Jazz Quartet appears on an episode of Jazz Casual, hosted by Ralph Gleason and originally telecast by San Francisco’s KQED-TV on May 16, 1962:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

From 2005:

I recently saw a stage actress I know in an episode of a popular TV series. This was a new experience for me. I’ve watched any number of writer friends hold forth on talk shows, and I’ve even tuned into David Letterman to see a band whose members I know quite well. But all those people were being themselves, more or less, whereas my actress friend was pretending to be someone else….

Read the whole thing here.

“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”

Philip Roth, Everyman

Victor Borge does his “phonetic punctuation” routine on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was telecast live by CBS on June 12, 1960:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?”

Philip Roth, The Counterlife

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review webcasts of David Rabe’s Suffocation Theory and Samuel D. Hunter’s Lewiston/Clarkston. Here’s an excerpt.

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Dallas’ Undermain Theatre offered one of the most spectacular examples of how webcasting can put a regional drama company on the national map when it presented a flawless virtual production of Conor McPherson’s “St. Nicholas” in October. Now it’s returned to the well with David Rabe’s “Suffocation Theory,” a dramatized version of a short story originally published in the New Yorker in 2020. Like “St. Nicholas,” “Suffocation Theory” is a chillingly dark monologue performed by Bruce DuBose, the company’s producing artistic director, who is also a gifted actor. But this production is even more technically ambitious than its predecessor, so much so that it looks and feels less like a stage show than a miniature movie. Call it what you will, “Suffocation Theory” is a dazzling piece of theatrical work…

The emergence of Samuel D. Hunter as a playwright of consequence has been one of the most gratifying theatrical occurrences of the past decade. His plays, which are set in northern Idaho (his home state) and portray small-town life and its discontents in a soft-spoken yet  searching way, remind me strongly of the work of Horton Foote and Brian Friel, two other playwrights who understood in their bones the quiet complexities of the towns from which they came.

“Lewiston/Clarkston,” a pair of separate but related 90-minute plays that were first performed as a single-evening diptych with a dinner break off Broadway in 2018, is Mr. Hunter’s most ambitious undertaking to date…

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Read the whole thing here.