Shakespeare's plays are frequently staged in contemporary dress to make them accessible to modern audiences. Pulp Shakespeare keeps period garb and enlists his distinct style of language to cleverly restage Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

Perhaps the current popularity of characters leading double lives simply reflects a pervasive consciousness that we are all involved in a spiraling project whose purpose is to con each other.

Too often, Americans especially view theater as something that is only done in the English-speaking world. One of the coolest things about Edinburgh is finding a hidden gem from the great big wide world of theater, done by companies outside the U.S. and UK.

Does poetry have something to teach the business world? Simon Bainbridge, a literature professor at Lancaster University, believes it does.

"Ambitious" is a word that gets used a lot in describing the Hidden Room's production of Rose Rage. We get it. It is ambitious, no doubt, and also it was kind of inevitable.

This play, he told us, can in fact be viewed as a propaganda piece, justifying that act of usurpation. Shakespeare? As an apparatchik? Who knew??

Imagine it again: Not just a few but a majority of those voting in 2008 were enlightened hearts and they made electoral history. But not one of them is onstage in Clybourne Park. How then is this play, as The New York Times' theatre critic claims, "ferociously smart"?

We in the arts face major challenges, including, but certainly not limited to, the short-term economic situation in which we all work. But simply suggesting that 'things must change' without giving us concrete proposals is not helpful. What exactly do these people mean by 'old models' anyway?