News

Lewis and Clark’s Excellent adventure

by STEVEN MIKULAN
LA WEEKLY 12/23/05
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“…Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates…is an important work, even if that importance proves temporary. It appears against a flat horizon of nearly universal artistic and political silence regarding America’s Iraqi adventure and its garrisoning of the world with military bases. When Harold Pinter, in a prerecorded speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, denounced U.S. policy a few weeks ago, The New York Times was virtually alone in covering Pinter’s outraged comments. Neither the Washington Post nor the Los Angeles Times covered them. These two newspapers are merely like the rest of a country that covers its ears and drowns out bad news with singsong doggerel…Schenkkan’s play forces us to listen for once…” 

Playwright Robert Schenkkan Returns to the Scene of His Pulitzer

LA Downtown News, December 3, 2005
by Kristin Friedrich

“Robert Schenkkan was driving in his hometown Seattle last year when inspiration struck. The Pacific Ocean was on his left, the Olympic Mountains to his right, and the weather was conspiratorially pleasant.

“It was a sunny day,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright said last week. “We get a lot of sunny days. We just don’t tell people because we don’t want anybody moving up there.”

That’s when the odd title for his new play hit: Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates. It gets odder, Schenkkan explained during a break from rehearsals for the play, which has its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum Dec. 11. The touchstone for the piece wasn’t the famed explorers, but rather the war in Iraq….”

VARIETY – GORDON COX 
11/20/2005

“He’s in the midst of a year during which he’ll have four stage preems. His picaresque adventure “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates,” starring James Barbour, begins perfs at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles on Dec. 1…”

Arts Review
THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
BY ROBERT FAIRES 

“…We’ve been enjoying this type of farce ever since Plautus spun yarns about wily Roman slaves, but some three-quarters of a century ago, Tinseltown put a special spin on the form, a uniquely American zaniness that came to be called screwball. That’s what Schenkkan is channeling here, the Hollywood hijinks of Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, with their odd-couple romances, adorable madcaps and quipping cynics, and send-ups of American dreams. He loves those stories, and when his Manny sets his silver tongue wagging with that trademark phrase, he’s giving his audience what they want to hear. He’s churning out dreams just like the studios…” 

In an extraordinary season of four premieres, UT alum Robert Schenkkan brings his old school a new screwball comedy…
by Robert Faires 

THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
11/04/05
When you’re a university theatre department with an alumnus who has a Pulitzer Prize in drama, it’s only natural that you’d want to produce one of his plays, right? And beyond merely mounting one, you’d be really tickled to give one its first production anywhere. So it is with the UT Department of Theatre and Dance, which is over the moon about its premiere of a new script by 1975 grad Robert Schenkkan….