Leila Buck’s Game Show Spoofs ICE Cruelty by Hannah Yurke “American Dreams,” with its built in rising dynamic and audience interaction, has the absorbing compulsion of reality TV— and a menacing undertone. The occasional, quickly resolved technical hitch adds the thrills and spills of live television as theater. Leila Buck and Tamilla Woodard pit…
Anna Deavere Smith Reignites Struggle over Police Brutality by Patricia L. Morin Twilight: Los Angeles, the PBS movie, resurrects the explosive problem of police brutality. Raging riots ignited over the acquittal of four officers who savagely beat Rodney King on March 3, 1991. Now, thirty years later, we are faced with the murders of…
Shakespeare Gets Dangerous in Women’s Prison Setting by Kim Waldron “Mischief, thou art afoot,” and it’s thrilling. In Director Phyllida Lloyd’s “Julius Caesar,” the actors appear as inmates in a women’s jail, fighting to mount their production under prison authority. First, a young woman shyly explains how she ended up in jail; then the…
Millennial Notes Indira Etwaroo Stages Black Lives in Glass Boxes by Abby Tozer A Brooklyn cityscape overlooks the bright yellow street mural memorializing 159 Black victims of injustice—from Emmett Till to Breonna Taylor. The vast, bright yellow letters proclaim the names of the dead. The name “TAMIR RICE” is boldly painted in front of…