Bill Marx
With the 1% rapidly vacuuming up the resources of the upper and middle classes, A.R. Gurney’s comic vision of the tipsy idle rich, shorn of cares and criminality, floats completely free of reality.
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British dramatist Caryl Churchill proffers a valuable line of satiric attack on our delusions of doing good, so it is easy to forgive the dramatist her broad and scattershot comic approach.
Unfortunately, there are only flickers of Kurt Vonnegut’s dark and playful genius in “Make Up Your Mind.”
Whenever you hear greeting card bromides intoned with a straight face (it’s usually in scenes set in a hospital) you know that moral fuzziness isn’t far behind.
Interestingly, both of these powerful visions of horror root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children.
Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan is chained to a dreary, fact-driven approach in “All the Way,” tossing in bits and pieces of “what if” for unconvincing dramatic effect.
George Scialabba is still outfoxing the professional eggheads in For the Republic, his third collection of essays on political and cultural topics.
Arts Commentary: David Koch, WGBH Trustee — The Real God of Carnage?
The opportunity to protest the presence of Tea Party mega-funder David Koch on the board of WGBH this Wednesday should not be missed by anyone who is interested in preserving the soul (and/or sanity) of public broadcasting.
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