Rhoda Feng | The Smart Set

american (tele)visions review

Rhoda Feng — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 12:35:31 +0000

Meet the Estradas. The father, Octavio (Raúl Castillo), was the first member of the family to arrive in America. After nine months of working 10-hour shifts (and having his pay docked for six of those hours because he’s an “illegal”) he finally saved up enough money “to pay coyotes so that my whole family could come […]

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An Ode to Perfume Strips

Rhoda Feng — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 10:40:00 +0000

Does reading leave a residue? Whenever I’ve accumulated a stash of glossy magazines, I like to make strips from the perfume samples embedded in their pages. These I will turn into bookmarks, which will turn me into a voracious consumer of words. That, at least, is the promise contained in voluptuous notes of sunny daffodil […]

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Dominique Morisseau’s Fugitive Feelings

Rhoda Feng — Thu, 12 May 2022 11:30:00 +0000

 “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” wrote Walter Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” “Just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.” We are presented […]

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Only Connect: On “A Thousand Ways”

Rhoda Feng — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 12:30:00 +0000

The last play I saw in person was on the evening of March 12, 2020 — a date that, in retrospect, was close enough to the official start of lockdown in New York City that I can’t help feeling like I’d gotten away with something — a heist, maybe, or narrowly missing a collision with […]

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An Elegy for the Working Class

Rhoda Feng — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 12:30:00 +0000

Before COVID drew a curtain over Broadway, the Public Theater in New York produced an improbable play about a real-life tragedy. Billed as a work of documentary theater, Coal Country told the story of a deadly explosion that tore a hole through the Upper Big Branch Mine and the lives of families in Montcoal, West […]

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Close Encounters With Tolstoy

Rhoda Feng — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Maybe you have had the experience, during the long caesura of COVID-19, of taking an online course. Each week, at a designated time, you would place yourself in front of a monitor emitting its eerie clamshell glow and try to pay attention to an instructor reciting some prompts for discussion. Making eye contact was always hard: you were never sure where to train […]

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