A Passion for Disaster Volumes I and II offers a challenging selection of J.G. Van Tine’s work for the theater, including The House of Tolstoy, H. Melville, Whaler, and Assassination Games These dramas are exceptional in engaging perverse motives, denied energies and entrapment tactics in their social and intimate hiding places: in politics and family, on the job, in secret fantasies, among children, before the mirror, behind ambitions, and in bed.
A Passion for Disaster Volumes I and II offers a challenging selection of J.G. Van Tine’s work for the theater, including The House of Tolstoy, H. Melville, Whaler, and Assassination Games These dramas are exceptional in engaging perverse motives, denied energies and entrapment tactics in their social and intimate hiding places: in politics and family, on the job, in secret fantasies, among children, before the mirror, behind ambitions, and in bed.
In this revised and expanded edition of Bloodball, J. G. Van Tine probes the mind-set that dominates media sport.
In post-revolutionary France of the early 1830’s, the elite combats dissent and opposition through a network of censors, informers and unofficial deputies. As modes of surveillance, the police also set up businesses, including brothels, publishers, cabarets and a clearing house for stolen paintings, enterprises that affect not only the targeted population but entertainers, actors and authors, among them Balzac and Henri Beyle (pen name Stendhal). Apart from risking arrest while his family’s fortunes are sinking, Balzac pursues wealth through enterprises that increase his debts, one being his collection of paintings. Predictably, many transactions are scrutinized by the police, who recruit young people in and around the arts, few of whom know what ends they serve, but the game, seemingly hedged by legal and bureaucratic safeguards, takes unexpected turns.