In Richard Bean‘s affecting “Toast,” workers in a British bread factory stick together to combat fatigue, danger, insecurity. Bean wrote the play out of his experiences working at a bread factory in Yorkshire when he was 18.
The men work with old machinery that might break down and cause the owner, who is doing no maintenance, to shift production elsewhere. Yet, they endure stoically the danger of getting hurt – someone‘s arm got crushed — because they need the work. We come to see that they also need each other.
The American Interest, May 12, 2016 – Solving the offshore money-laundering and tax evasion system is easy, but the Obama Administration‘s proposal isn‘t the way to do it.
Stung by the Panama Papers revelations of worldwide tax evasion by the rich and powerful, President Obama has seized the moment to propose a solution guaranteed to gather headlines”and then fail. But if he wanted to, he could, through the Treasury Department, end the system of offshore tax havens with a stroke of the pen.
First, let‘s look at the solution and, then, at what‘s wrong with the President‘s proposal.
The Obama proposal acknowledges the threat offshoring poses to our national security. Treasury estimates that $300 billion in illicit proceeds are generated annually in the United States due to financial crimes. But it then essentially ignores the powerful weapon it can wield against that threat.
Philippe Chow‘s cuisine is delicate, subtle, an infusion of Chinese flavors into an American sensibility. One of the waiters told me, “It‘s Americanized food. It‘s Beijing style, but you won‘t find this in Beijing.” It‘s a sophisticated take on Beijing cuisine.
“Echoes” is a powerful and intense play that explores the imperialist mindset as it compares the experiences of two women who lived 175 years apart in Ipswich, England, and were each swept up in the murderous rampage of godly imperialist killers. It won a Spirit of the Fringe award in Edinburgh last year and transferred to London.
April 26, 2016 – A drumbeat of the Troika that ended Greek sovereignty last year was that the government wasn‘t collecting taxes. The Troika was the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank. That charge came from a collection of states that includes some of the world’s worst tax evasion enablers, including the Luxembourg of EC President Jean-Claude Junker, whose country is a world class tax haven. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis revealed for the first time how days after he resigned, the Troika effectively abolished a unit he had set up to combat tax evasion.
A little weird, but Sherlock Holmes stories always are. A guy who wants a young employee to cut her hair. And to wear blue. He lives in a castle, of course. Maybe his wife is a lunatic. So the plot thickens. It‘s “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”
April 14, 2016 – Bernie Sanders supporters came to my Greenwich Village neighborhood April 13th, filling Washington Square Park for a rally that raised the issues he has made the focus of his campaign – how the super-rich have taken over the country‘s politics in their interests.
April 7, 2016 – Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker appeared at the Council on Foreign Relations a few days ago and treated the members to misinformation about the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, which is being promoted by President Obama and corporate America as a free trade benefit. Opposition to TPP has swelled as the public found out the details of the treaty which was negotiated in secret, with input only from corporate representatives, and not even made available to members of Congress. Much of it was revealed by Wikileaks. Pritzker said in her remarks at the April 4th event that critics were “not telling an accurate story or telling part of the story and blaming trade for something that‘s larger.” So, in a question, I pointed out that “I heard a lot of facts that I thought were misstated from your presentation.”
Alfred Uhry‘s 1995 play “The Robber Bridegroom” is a hokey, campy amusing fantasy complete with an evil stepmother, a naïve father, and a two-faced hero/villain, Jamie Lockhart (Steven Pasquale) who has, we must believe, a different face when he wears a small marker that indicates a berry stain. All done to the fine and lively sounds of invigorating country music. (Music by Robert Waldman.) And Connor Gallagher‘s very good down-home choreography.
George Bernard Shaw‘s first play, given a first rate performance by The Actors Company Theatre directed by David Staller, establishes the theme of personal morality vs business corruption that would be a signature of his works through the years. He wrote it in 1892. Shaw from the start liked to skewer snobbery. Harry Trench (a naïve but likable Jeremy Beck) and Billy, more formally William De Burgh Cokane, (the unctuous Jonathan Hadley) are British tourists at a hotel on the Rhine. Pretentious Billy flavors his speech with French, and we enjoy the fact that his accent and grammar are dreadful.
In the canon of arts that are little known because they weren‘t created by white men, add an 18th century baroque opera composed by Joseph Bologne, born 1745 in Guadeloupe, the son of a French plantation owner and a slave.
It‘s a charming confection that was designed as a chamber piece, to be performed privately, because the Paris Opera would not accept “a mulatto.”
His father brought him to France at 7 years old to be educated. He was brilliant. And an accomplished fencer, which made him at 16 a chevalier and eased his way into society. At 17 he read in Rousseau‘s “Social Contract” that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” which challenged the existence of slavery.
Think of Jonathan Swift‘s “A Modest Proposal” as if it were designed by corporate consultants figuring out how to dispose of large numbers of people unlucky enough to have contracted a very deadly virus about to go global. Then move to Aaron Loeb’s engrossing bizarre, dark play which posits a related idea that couldn’t be real. Or could it, in principle? Or the lack of it.
For secret project Senna, the major rules would be 1. No power point, 2. Assume the worst, and 3. No N-word. No, it‘s not that N-word, it‘s the other N-word. Consider the system diagram for Collection, Containment, Liquidation and Disposal.
This play is a period piece. The time is close enough to the present that it‘s fascinating but also a little irritating for a feminist. It was written by Hazel Ellis, an Irish actress and playwright in the 1930s. She performed at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and had success with several plays there.
A smart but rebellious kid gets suspended from a Catholic high school in New York City for saying he doesn‘t believe in God. He ends up at the Thomas Moore Preparatory School in Keene, NH, a small boarding school where he will continue to argue about ideas and also still get into fights and scrapes. John Patrick Shanley, the author of this engaging autobiographical play, presents a charming, vivid look back at how a precocious youth, who would become a major playwright, had to navigate the shoals of rigid school thinking and a run-in with a closeted gay teacher who came on to him. (There‘s also a mystery about a student who tried to kill himself.)
Salon, Feb 24, 2016 – Betty Friedan would vote for Bernie Sanders. I say that having known Betty near the start of the women‘s movement in the late ˜60s and at the end of her life. As a feminist, she was also a progressive committed to Bernie‘s vision of economic justice. But I have another reason.
I knew Betty from 1969 when she brought me into the feminist movement, asking me to communicate to the media the message of feminism and of the National Organization for Women, of which she was founding president. Not an easy job in those days! From ridicule to don‘t take too seriously to, well, there‘s something significant happening. Rather like what Bernie has faced.
Feb 4, 2016 – Art as politics reaches new intensities in the Whitney Museum‘s disturbing and powerful new exhibit of film maker Laura Poitras‘ selection of videos and documents to define the U.S. government‘s threats to liberty after 9/11. The exhibit opens in New York Feb 5 and continues till May 1, 2016.
Feb 2, 2016 – At the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, I pointed out to Stanley Fischer, Vice Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that the current low unemployment rate he cited in his talk doesn‘t mean what it did when workers had good manufacturing jobs – when now the employed are often working for the minimum wage and need government aid. Shouldn’t the Fed put out those numbers? He avoided answering the question.
The title suggests this play by David Mamet is about a woman, but it‘s really about politics and corruption. And the trendy topic of tax evasion. Al Pacino is in top form in a slightly over-the-top caricature of a character, a portrayal which in this case is warranted. His Mickey Ross is a heavy-New-York-accented probably Jewish character who made big bucks in ways that probably skirted or shattered legality. At least it‘s clear he doesn‘t care much about the law.
Bobby Nesbitt‘s tribute to the cabaret greats of Las Vegas is much richer than any medley of songs from the star singers of the time. His performance at the Tennessee Williams Theatre reprises the iconic tunes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and more. But he also offers some social history that sets “the Rat Pack” – the name given by actress Lauren Bacall –in an American context. (She said, “You look like a goddam rat pack.”)
Think of “prime” as the second version of something, sort of like the file you download twice, so the second has little 1 after it. Here it‘s not a file, but the vision of a person, maybe a holographic double.
In Jordan Harrison‘s sci fi computer era play about memory, an 85-year-old widow (Lois Smith) talks to the avatar of her late husband Walter (Noah Bean).
John Doyle‘s staging of “The Color Purple” is a hokey take on Marsha Norman‘s dramatization of the Alice Walker novel about a young black woman in a society of predatory black men. Musical vignettes in jazz, gospel, ragtime and blues make this a visual chamber opera rather than a story play. The production numbers are appealing, the performers are very fine, so it works as opera. But as drama, the story lacks subtlety.
In Arthur Miller‘s tragedy of poverty and patriarchy, director Ivo Van Hove strips out the naturalism of sets and real entrances and exits, so you have just the sense of primal actors. Is that why they wear street clothes but go barefoot? To remind us of the natural animal? (Otherwise it‘s an affectation.)
The surreal sense begins with the pinkish light that suffuses the stage when longshoremen Eddie (a riveting and tragic Mark Strong) and Louis (Richard Hansell) appear after a hard day at the docks. There is chorale music in the background. They are in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Following their 2013 Drama Desk nominated “Le Jazz Hot: How the French Saved Jazz,” the brothers Peter and Will Anderson are back with another video and music show, this one about jazz greats Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Featured in “Le Jazz Hot,” Ellington was one of America‘s black jazz musicians who went to France beginning in the 1920s, because the French were a lot more hospitable to them than were Americans.
Robert Lobe has for years created unusual sculptures, presented outdoors and in galleries, that use natural rocks, logs, leaves, and the like as the basis of metal sculptures.
