Starting with a breezy, witty and emphatically modern Russian-to-English translation by director Curt Columbus, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre production of Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov is a darkly comic and cerebral delight. It could be the best production of Uncle Vanya you’re ever likely to see. One of the epic dysfunctional families of drama slowly […]
Playwright Lillian Hellman was an awful person: Self-hating Jew, apologist for Stalin, plagiarist of the lives of other people, possessed of a remarkable talent for alienating friends, and prone to ruinous litigation. Hellman, perhaps because of her own deep character flaws, mastered an uncanny empathy in writing plays about awful people. Being evil is not […]
Herb Weiss and Nancy Carriuolo, co-editors of The Selected E-Mail Correspondences of Richard Walton, a commemorative collection of writing from the universally respected advocate for social justice, have released the e-book for free download on the fifth anniversary of Walton’s December 2012 death. “We hope that this book brings back fond memories of Richard and that […]
Whether to consider deaths and injuries from guns a public health problem, and therefore to bring to bear the statistical tools of epidemiology, has been a substantial controversy since at least the 1990s. Gun rights attorney Don Kates was the lead author with four professors of biology and medicine of a seminal and influential 1994 […]
The goal of a 12-step program is not to get you to climb up high enough to jump and kill yourself, but playwright Young Jean Lee seems to employ that as her model for Christianity. Repeated references to going through “doors to God” make the afterlife sound so attractive that Lee presents Christianity as a […]
“We anticipate signing on to the lawsuit and are awaiting the language of the lawsuit to properly evaluate it,” said Amy Kempe, public information officer for Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin, referring to multi-state litigation announced and led by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman to challenge yesterday’s rollback of net neutrality […]
Men telling women what women want in defiance of their own expressed wishes is a long tradition, eerily echoed in a recent (2003) controversy over whether to dig up and relocate to Paris the remains of novelist and playwright George Sand, who died in 1876 and was buried in the family cemetery behind her house […]
Hobbyist (non-commercial) drones, technically called “unmanned aircraft vehicles” (UAV) or “unmanned aircraft systems” (UAS), are still in the early stages of rapid growth in popularity. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimated in 2016 that there were about 1.10 million in operation with expected increases to 2.15 million by the end of 2017 and 3.55 million […]
Charles Manson finally died last night, at 11:13pm Eastern Time Sunday. I don’t think anyone who is too young to personally remember the 1960s can come close to understanding why his particular brand of evil never quite faded, and why he still received about four fan letters daily until his death. I believe that the […]
Holiday-themed dance performances from nearly every Rhode Island company will open the season, ranging from traditional to contemporary work. The Rhode Island College Dance Company (ric.edu/pas) will host the Bang Group, Friday (Dec 1) and Saturday (Dec 2) at Sapinsley Hall, in a collaboration called Nut/Cracked, “an ode to American eclecticism” they describe as “The Nutcracker, […]