August Wilson’s Century Cycle > Spoiler-free scene breakdown Premiered: 1984. Setting: a recording studio in Chicago, 1927. 10 characters An opening note describes the context of the city and the significance of blues music. Act I Money-man Sturdyvant orders manager Irvin to keep “her” in line. To Sturdyvant, this is all just business. When band…
A man arrested at DC checkpoint yesterday tells the Washington Post he is a private security guard, hired to protect media equipment. Yes, lots of people are understandably uptight after the insurrection at the Capitol last week; but in America, all suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Wesley Allan Beeler…
August Wilson’s Century Cycle > Spoiler-free scene breakdown Premiered: 1988. Setting: The Hollys’ boarding house, Pittsburgh. 1911. 11 characters (a fairly large cast for a drama, including 2 children who would typically be double-cast; not an easy play to produce) Long stage directions before the first scene describe the children of freed slaves moving north.…
In popular culture, Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek has a reputation of being a womanizer. Chris Pine’s portrayal of Kirk in the rebooted movies certainly plays up that character trait, but in Kirk’s original appearance, the second pilot episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” it’s Kirk’s helmsman Gary Mitchell who follows a…
A stranger approached me today. I was actually kind of terrified at first, since the last time a stranger approached me it was a security guard telling me I had overstayed my welcome in a mall that was closing for the night. (I was trying to get work done while waiting for a family member…
Today is my last official day teaching a compressed winter term “Special Topics in American Literature” course devoted to August Wilson’s Century Cycle. Last night I had a dream that Wilson wrote an eleventh play that I didn’t know about; or that I somehow missed covering one of his ten cycle plays. In my dream,…
August Wilson’s Century Cycle > Spoiler-free scene breakdown. Premiere: 2003 Setting: Aunt Ester’s parlor, 1839 Wylie, Pittsburgh. 1904. Prologue (late at night) Troubled Citizen Barlow arrives, seeking Aunt Ester. Eli (handyman and “gatekeeper”) tells him to come back Tuesday. Citizen tries to push past him; they tussle, upsetting a lamp. Ester picks up Citizen’s hat…
Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is "To Battle: A Fig…The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)Did you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree?“If…
I really never paid much attention to Schwarzenegger’s time as governor of California, but because I was in living in Wisconsin during part of former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura’s time as governor of Minnesota, I guess I expected bluster and bravado. Yes, waving the Conan sword certainly provided manly spectacle for the groundlings, but the…
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is scaling back its print edition to two days a week as part of the 235-year-old newspaper’s transition to an all-digital news operation, documents show. The plan is to eliminate its Friday print edition beginning Feb. 27, according to a letter from Post-Gazette’s human resources manager provided by the newsroom’s employee union.…
Journalists face a unique threat when covering events, especially the upcoming inauguration where there have been posts on message boards saying reporters are soft targets and free game. The aim of this guide is to give a few broad tips on how to react and survive in a situation that could result in a mass…
Traditional journalism values a focus on news reporting that is fair and impartial, guided by principles like truth, verification and accuracy. But those standards are not observed across the board in the “news” content that people consume. Tim Groeling, a communications professor at the University of California Los Angeles, said some consumers take too much…
Rewatching ST:TNG After discovering that the crew on a missing science vessel has met grisly deaths, the Enterprise crew gets stuck in a Space Thing of the Week, and everyone starts getting unusually irritable. Meanwhile, Troi has recurring nightmares about being suspended in a flying harness. On my rewatch it seemed contrived that the Space…
Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is "To Battle: A Fig…“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025York Corpus…
Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get…
Apple Inc has threatened to remove the Parler social networking service from its App Store unless the company changes its content moderation policies, Parler Chief Executive John Matze told Reuters on Friday. Parler is a social network where many supporters of President Donald Trump have migrated after being banned from services such as Twitter Inc.…
Twitter suspended Donald Trump’s account on the site Friday evening in the latest escalation by social media companies against a president they accuse of spreading misinformation and inciting violence. —Yahoo! News Similar:Ties of Blood and Water #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 19) Kira re-evaluates a …York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to…
Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is "To Battle: A Fig…“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025York Corpus…
This is not just an issue of a double standard between BLM protesters and white, Republican rioters. It is an issue of safety and justice. Black people asking for accountability when police are violent were met with violence from police. White people attempting to stop an election by force is met with sympathy and seemingly…
I was honored to play Alquist in Artistic Prosperity’s virtual production of RUR over the summer. I’m glad to see Čapek’s play is getting some attention in the Guardian. Not many plays introduce a new word to the language. One that did was Karel Čapek’s RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague…