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Tina Shepard

The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles

May 4, 2026

Inspired in part by "he Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann’s 1924 meditation on illness and temporality, Zimet’s play borrows not its plot but its sensibility: the peculiar dilation and contraction of time as it is lived, remembered, and imagined. Like Mann’s sanatorium-bound protagonist, Zimet’s characters find themselves suspended in a liminal zone where past, present, and future bleed into one another with disorienting grace. The result is not mere homage but a vivid reanimation of Mann’s central insight—that time, far from being fixed, is a profoundly subjective medium. [more]

T.B. Sheets

May 18, 2017

The opening resembles that of Mann’s novel: a horse and buggy deliver a visitor to a tuberculosis sanitarium on a mountain top overlooking a valley, suggesting that the unspecified time is 100 years ago, prior to W.W. I. Immediately, the doctor discovers that the newcomer has T.B. and needs weeks of rest. This One Who Has Come from the City to Heal meets and interacts with the other denizens, including a healer, a mother of a degenerate child, one who is building a space ship, and one who composes sounds and visions, as well as having the ability to see those who have passed away. [more]