[ssba]
And yet, we’re still here. Our party is a recognition of just that: tenacity and survival. The point is getting to know each other again, to meet and re-meet, and start to reimagine who we are and who we can be as a community.
“A lot of the world theater that came into town, I’d say, now that’s theater, that’s crazy, that’s cool, that’s exciting. I’d never seen work like that before. I don’t think I’d even have known how to approach ‘Etta and Ella. . .’ had I stayed in Chicago. I would never have figured that out.”
It was different century. It was different country. Yes, it was the United States, but it was a different country nonetheless. And it happened in Los Angeles.
It could be argued that this is a play about authoritarianism — i.e. guidance on how to best live life by people who, armed with either a religious or political credo, claim to know better.
This is the second half: one person’s commemoration of work that stood out in a difficult year.
And yet, there are those random blooms suddenly flowering in unexpected locations. They are fewer than I recall in prior years, but they’re out there. They give me hope, if only for their tenacity. I’ll focus on those in Part 2 of this article, next week.
The structure of “Henry VIII” aside, if these aren’t themes singularly pertinent to our times, I don’t know what are.
How do we know what we think we know is true?
The magistrate is (almost) directly out of Sweeney Todd. For his gob-smacking indifference to legal proprieties, they could rename him Judge Turpin, and hardly a soul would notice.
Fowler’s strikingly cogent concept is to endow slaves with cosmic powers (which become comic powers) over their mortal Athenian overseers — not unlike the way in which the slaves outwit their masters in their quest for freedom, in the ancient Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence.
