Rob Silverman Ascher - Simpler and With More Laughter (Page 2)

Handwritten, underlined text that says "snubbed!"

Simpler and With More Laughter Presents: The 2025 Snubbies!

Who needs the Oscars? Even with Conan O’Brien hosting, they’ll be disappointing, overlong, and, this year at least, likely transphobic and weird. So, as a cycle of new films comes to a close (like Rosh Hashanah for movies), let’s take some time to celebrate some of the

Attempts to Tip the Scales

In presenting the classics, directors and producers tend to foreground an aesthetic twist in their production. Dramaturg extraordinaire Anne Cattaneo, in the chapter “Deepen an Interpretation” in her book The Art of Dramaturgy, uses “Coriolanus as Stalin” as a shorthand for this inclination. Maybe this happens due to anxiety about

A man in his 30s wears armor, a ratty linen shirt, and a golden bowl on his head. He has stage blood on his face as well.

Tilting at Mirrors

For the return of lauded Chicago theatre company Lookingglass, an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote feels like an auspicious choice of material. Lookingglass’ brand of equally intimate and epic theatre asks its audience to lean in and absorb the fact that they are sharing space with top-flight artists.

A middle-aged white man stands on a mound of dirt, flanked by a white man in a long brown coat and a black man wearing jeans.

All the Way to Being Brutal

Brady Corbet’s postwar epic The Brutalist follows László Toth, a Jewish architect seeking refuge in post-war America, as he embarks on a building project for a mysterious Philadelphia benefactor and is reunited with his wife and niece. It’s a sensory-overload period piece, shot on the once-defunct Vistavision format,

Bertolt Brecht, a white, middle-aged man adjusts his glasses, with a cigar between the fingers on his right hand.

Simpler and With More Laughter

Hello and welcome to Simpler and With More Laughter! You're likely seeing this because you previously followed me on Substack. For a variety of reasons, I have migrated my writing from Substack to Ghost, the service you are reading on now. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has elucidated many of