Kadin Purath is a Trinity junior and a culture editor for Recess.
In the hands of the Duke Department of Theater Studies, lies can share truth, farce can show genuine heart and expectation can be subverted. There is still an opportunity to enjoy the second half of the two-week run of “The Liars.” Catch it while you can; it’s smart, sharp and genuinely funny.
Second-year MFA student Sai Varadan is currently presenting his thesis in the Friedl Building’s Fredric Jameson Gallery. The Chronicle sat down with Varadan to talk about his life, work, journey to Duke and “The Child Within,” his thesis.
Rebecca Wahls, Duke Theater Studies’ artist in residence and instructor of theater studies, reconfigured Bertold Brecht’s mid-20th century play “The Good Woman of Setzuan” for the modern day and the Duke stage with “GOOD.”
“Green and Gold” can only sing in church. The 2025 film has the type of voice that knows what notes it has to hit and often hits them, but shows no genuine heart outside of the people, place and culture it draws its life from.
“The Brutalist” is as much the text itself — a story of a Holocaust survivor and talented architect, Laszlo (Adrien Brody), who makes his way to the U.S. and befriends a powerful patron, Van Buren (Guy Pierce), of his art — as it is a metatextual argument for the future of filmmaking.
“Left of Black,” a web series hosted by Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Professor of African and African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, was a Gold Winner of the 2024 Davey Awards. The Davey Award is given to “creative Davids” — in reference to the Biblical David and Goliath story — for achievement in a respective medium without a “stratospheric budget.”
Bloated and talkative for a film where two separate characters emphasize their lack of skill at oration, “Gladiator II” is messy and imperfect. However, it is also enjoyable and argumentative — most often with itself.
While the performance was brilliant and astonishing, the personalities of Finckel and Han were the standouts of the night. Their engagement with chamber music through festivals, production companies, performance and teaching was obvious in their treatment of the audience and respect for the performance.
“Conclave” finds itself in physical and intellectual spaces that its thematic and argumentative self could never hope to fill.
In a genre that is no longer subversive or new, any self-reference falls flat if it doesn’t build on what came before.
