Theater & the Arts
Annabella (Lydia Wilson), a young woman in black leggings, puts on rock music and dances to it. Wilson plays her as she might an insouciant high-fashion model. Men in suits come on the stage prancing, knees jutting up to the disco beat.
This is Parma and a bloody story of incest and revenge will be told, though not exactly as 17th-century author John Ford had in mind. It‘s a stunning campy melodrama by Britain‘s inimitable Cheek by Jowl company.
Theater & the Arts
For me the most shocking moment in Katori Hall’s play, Hurt Village, was when two grungy teens amuse themselves with a nasty rap in which they cruelly and crudely insult each other and their families. In this down-at-the-heels housing project in Memphis, even these kids’ amusement is mean and self-destructive. Forget about normal civility. The people we meet address each other as nigger, bitch, and mother fucker.
Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
100Reporters, March 19, 2012 – One could be forgiven for thinking that the New York State Legislature was a criminal enterprise. It had its mafioso style assemblyman, Democrat Tony Seminerio, telling a prospective “client” that he would “bury” him unless he paid off.
It had entrepreneurs like Democratic Senator Pedro Espada Jr., who set up a community health operation and, prosecutors say, looted it for millions.
It even had a comical nickel-and-dime guy, Democratic Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, who sent one of his staffers driving on the New York Thruway with his E-ZPass so that McLaughlin could fake time in Albany and collect per diem payments.
New York State has rules against some of those practices, but rarely were they enforced against legislators who were collecting huge sums of cash from companies that wanted laws passed or state contracts awarded.
Theater & the Arts
It has been reported today, March 17, that Mike Davey made up many of the details in his monologue about Apple and the workers who make its electronics at the huge Chinese factory, Foxconn, described in the review below. Some of those facts are true about dangerous working conditions are true, but not as he said them. He described meeting workers poisoned with hexane. In fact, such a problem occurred 1,000 miles away. There have been under-age workers at some Apple suppliers, but he didn’t meet a gaggle of them at Foxconn. His interpreter was reached by another reporter, Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for the radio show Marketplace, and she denied that Davey met 13-year-old workers or a man with a mangled hand. Davey’s response was that he is not a journalist.
Blog
March 12, 2012 – Mary O’Grady today used a killing in Haiti linked to bribery of former Haiti Teleco officials to attack the Democrats. She said investigators might uncover the details of the arrangement that Fusion Telecommunications”run by former Democratic Party Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen with Joseph P. Kennedy II and numerous influential Democrats had in Haiti during the Clinton years. She didn’t mention that there is much more evidence of Teleco bribery by IDT, then run by former Republican Congressman James Courter with a host of high-level GOP bigwigs.
Theater & the Arts
Athol Fugard’s 1961 parable about apartheid South Africa, directed by the author at the Signature Theatre, blazes with its audacious concept and staging. It is one of those small number of plays that stand out for both their literary and political significance.
