Blog
RALEIGH, North Carolina, Inter Press Service (IPS), April 27, 2010 – Robert Moses, 75, a legendary leader and organiser in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, was huddled with a dozen people discussing plans for a campaign to make quality education a constitutional right. On one side was his son Omowale, 38. Next to Omo was John Doar, 89, head of the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department in 1960-67 and prosecutor of the major civil rights cases of that era.
The age differences were noticeable at the conference they attended this month in Raleigh, North Carolina, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was a moment for the elders – as high school and college students at the conference called them – to pass the torch to a new generation of activists.
Blog
April 19, 2010 –
Last week, I was at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, for the 50th anniversary conference of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led the sit-in movement of the 1960s. I attended SNCC’s founding conference at Shaw in April 1960.
That meeting had been called in response to the February 1,, 1960 protest in Greensboro, NC, when four black students sat at an all-white Woolworth’s lunch counter, demanded to be served and were arrested.
Theater & the Arts
Million Dollar Quartet is hot on music and slight on story, the latter a chance 1956 gathering of country and rock innovators Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis at a Memphis recording studio. Fans will like the stars’ doubles’ performances of the songs that made them famous. And this jukebox musical jumps off the charts whenever Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis, dominates the stage with his wild jazzy piano playing and furious rock lyrics.
Theater & the Arts
Creating a richness in their arrangement that adds to the beauty of each poem, director Peter Brook has ordered 31 Shakespearean sonnets, dramatically recited by Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington, to create a striking theater piece. It elegantly expresses love as it consumes men and women in the highs and lows of their relationships and into their later years. The poems are grouped to praise love that lasts through time;and to plumb the pain of separation; the torments of jealousy, self-deception, and guilt; and the sorrows of older age. That doesn’t quite make a play, but it’s more than a poetry reading.
Theater & the Arts
This is not the kind of black tie London cocktail party that Noel Coward was wont to attend. There may be champagne poured and secret infidelities going on, but the darkness that bubbles out of those glasses up reminds one of Albee or Pinter. The Actors Company Theatre has mounted a striking production of T.S. Eliot’s 1950 play that one won’t soon forget.
Theater & the Arts
Horton Foote’s story of a young boy growing to manhood in rural Texas in the early decades of the last century is so gripping, and elegantly performed, that it’s hard to acknowledge that the mundane events of family interactions, marriage, divorce, illness and death in the extended Robideaux clan are in themselves, presented with great subtlety by Michael Wilson, understated and sometimes almost without great drama. Or else, they are the drama of the every day.
Theater & the Arts
Valerie Harper channels Tallulah Bankhead. Her acting is so on the mark, so mesmerizing, that you would swear that the 30s stage and screen actress had come back to life. Her wit biting and risqué; her intelligence sharp; her vulgarity in your face, her talent opulent make you wish you had lived in her time.
