Lisa D‘Amour‘s play “Detroit” is a dark metaphor for the disintegration of American society. The acting is very good, and Annie Kauffman‘s direction is sharp and gritty, but this script sometimes appears almost like a TV melodrama. It‘s as if a “big idea” was slapped on top of a roiling personal and social drama.
The irony is that what has been described as the theater of the absurd is so real. Eugène Ionesco‘s “Rhinocéros” is a brilliant description of how people succumb to and collaborate with authoritarian regimes. In his art, there is a numbing truth.
French director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who runs the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, has given a dazzlingly staging at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Romanian playwright Ionesco‘s 1959 masterpiece about how ordinary people let themselves be led and manipulated till they turn into thugs and fascists. And how the most ordinary among them can shed his humanity and intellect — or find solitary courage.
Oct 15, 2012 – If you have followed the stories here showing strong evidence that IDT, the Newark-based telecom, bribed officials of the Haitian phone company, Teleco, you will be interested in today’s SEC filing by IDT. It says that the SEC and the Justice Department are still investigating charges made in 2004 by former IDT employee D. Michael Jewett that the company had paid off Haitian officials in connection with (ie. to get) a contract to supply long distance service between the U.S. and Haiti. That would have violated the FCPA, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. At the time, IDT was run by James Courter, the former Republican congressman from New Jersey.
Oct 8, 2012 – I always knew I should not invest/gamble in the stock market, and Scott Patterson has told me why. I always thought the system was rigged, gamed by the insiders, and Patterson, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has described that in “Dark Pools” in fascinating detail.
Did you think the stock market was about companies of good value raising capital because investors knew that the good value meant that their shares would be easily tradeable? And would likely go up in value? Because people who studied companies knew they were doing a good job? Forgetaboutit.
