The Year the War Came Home

Theater & the Arts  

Inter Press Service (IPS), May 14, 2008

On this 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that for the United States was the apogee of opposition to the war in Vietnam, two new Off Broadway plays explore divergent ways that U.S. citizens protested — and ponder the best way to contest a senseless war.

The Conscientious Objector by Michael Murphy describes the personal and political conflict faced by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. over his decision to speak out publicly against the war.

Something You Did by Willy Holtzman examines the decision of a stand-in for Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, to bring the war home by participating in a violent action that left a bystander dead.

The Houswife’s Lament

Theater & the Arts  

Inter Press Service (IPS) April 22, 2008

Since the 1950s, views in the United States have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women — or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages.

Four Broadway plays spanning those decades show one prominent downside: marriage as a smoldering cauldron of unfulfilled sexual desire or betrayal.

The U.S. works are about small-town Middle America: the Midwest, Mississippi, Oklahoma. They are William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County. The British revival is Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, about working class London.