Dateline: Siena, Italy: It lends distance to be spending the Fourth of July in another country. It’s a chance to proportionately celebrate much that is genuinely great about America (to adopt a sadly sullied phrase), but also to reflect on its failures. Continue reading “US Justice – Questionable in its Jailing of Women” »

ALL-TOO-ACCUSTOMED to dangers of extinction? Well … we do know, many of us, about threatened species like Africa’s black rhinoceros, the querulous-looking California Condor (pictured left), the Humpy Salmon of the northern Pacific, the tiny but beautiful Bird’s-F­oot Violet of the east and the mid-west, or the oddly-textured Amanita mushrooms of Texas (below right). But what of human languages that are endangered, and more specifically their alphabets, which can be extraordinarily eloquent visually as well as verbally? Continue reading “Rescuing Almost-Lost Building-Blocks of Communication” »

IT’S A CULTURAL FANFARE, and it certainly swells with capital-C ‘Culture’ – both highbrow and pop. New York City’s brand-new development, Hudson Yards, reportedly the most expensive private real estate development in American history (and “a billionaires’ fantasy city” according to critics) contains within it an ‘arts space’ with the disingenuous, plainspoken name: ‘The Shed’. Continue reading “Culture Amid the Towers of the Super-Rich” »

IT’S AN AUDACIOUS EFFORT, retelling on a Manhattan stage the story of Socrates’ trial and death.

That is the lofty aim of the simply-named Socrates, written by actor/writer/director Tim Blake Nelson and mounted by The Public Theater under the direction of Doug Hughes. (Opened Tuesday, April 16, 2019.) Continue reading “A Message for All Times – from 399 BC” »

THERE’S A GOOFINESS, delighting in its way, about Heidi Schreck. She greets us sweetly at the very beginning of her (almost) one-person production What the Constitution Means to Me, in an example of what we’ll later recognize as her self-diagnosed “psychotically polite” behavior – a result, she says, of being raised in the North-Western version of small-town America.    Continue reading “Theatrical Medium for Constitutional Dissection” »