This is a very New York play even if it takes place in Palm Springs, California. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz tells what happens when a New York writer who lives in Sag Harbor (where a lot of New York writers go in summer), journeys west to visit her extremely Republican parents. Extremely means they were friends of the Reagans.
Most of the characters in director August Pendleton’s brilliant staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters live in hazes of self-delusion and despair lit by flashes of hope and bitter disappointment. That could represent the unhappiness of individuals, especially women, who have little ability to change lives without joy. It can also stand for the illusions of the burgers and small-time aristocrats who as a group also saw no future in the moribund society of pre-revolutionary Russia.
Feb 5, 2011 – The final edit of a film about the jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a film to which I contributed, has been stolen from the offices of German director Cyril Tuschi. The documentary, Khodorkovsky, is to have its world premier at the Berlin International Film Festival Feb. 14. I did reporting for the film and also was video-interviewed for it. The film tells Khodorkovsky’s story from his youth to the build-up of his oil empire and his political challenge to then President Vladimir Putin. Putin had told the oligarchs, men who had stolen the Russian patrimony to build their wealth, that he wouldn’t bother them as long as they stayed out of politics. Khodorkovsky, however, sought to influence the Duma election. He was arrested in 2003 and then tried and jailed for tax evasion.
