Decades before playwright Caryl Churchill in her dotage earned a notorious reputation as arguably the most virulent anti-Semite active in mainstream British theater, her plays, despite the heavy baggage of Marxist Brechtian dialectical conventions, were plausibly entertaining. Indeed, like “Saturday Night Live,” her best and funniest work was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, […]

In 1914, absinthe was officially banned in France, ending an era (albeit a short one) and creating a legend surrounding the milky green liquid that supposedly fostered creativity, hallucinations and madness. The only true part of that legend, of course, was the fact that the spirit was erroneously made illegal in many countries for about […]