Culture Watch

The Tragedy of Involuntary Commitment

by Bruce Chadwick

Airswimming Irish Repertory Theatre 132 W. 22d Street New York, N.Y.Airswimming is a jolting shocker about two women incarcerated in a mental hospital in England for fifty years due to their eccentricity and because they violated British society’s rules of conduct during the 1920s. At the same time, Charlotte Jones’s 1997 play is an enduring, enchanting story of the strength of the human spirit and how two people’s friendship helped them survive a living hell.In 1922, Dora (played by Aedin Moloney) was tossed into St. Dymphnas Hospital for the Criminally Insane and followed there two years later by Persephone. They mark the first few years of their imprisonment, but so many years go by they lose count. The hospital has teamed them up to clean the bathrooms one hour each day, and that is the time we see them on stage. There, scrubbing down the bathtub, the pair realizes that they need each other to survive the Hades they occupy.

The Agony of the Soldier Returned from the Wars

by Bruce Chadwick

Water by the Spoonful Second Stage Theater 305 W. 43rd Street New York, N.Y.Elliot, a hulking war vet, has been back from Iraq for two years. He's still trying to find himself as he struggles to rejoin his deeply dysfunctional and drug addicted family in Philadelphia. He faces many of the same problems that vets faced coming home from Vietnam, Korea, all the way back to the American Revolution. He served his country honorably, but suffered physically and mentally. He arrived back a hero, but not to a hero’s welcome.Elliot is the centerpiece of Water by the Spoonful, the new play by Quiara Alegria Hudes, the author of the successful In the Heights. It's a confusing play that rambles through act one in fits and starts, and long stretches of boredom, before finding its way in the middle of act two. That;s is when Elliot lets down his warrior macho and emotional shield. That is when we see the torment he has lived through in Iraq. He was wounded several times and became addicted to pain killers during his recovery. He also has nightmares about the first man he killed in Iraq -- the man’s ghost keeps getting off the ground to struggle with him.

Chivalry Isn't Dead

by David Patten

It’s official; newspapers, TV, radio, and online news reports all announced it; male chivalry is nothing but a myth. Two Swedish economists, Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson, exposed the reality of male selfishness in their study, “Every Man for Himself, Gender, Norms, and Survival in Maritime Disasters”, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors claimed to have studied three centuries of shipwrecks, culling statistical data and quantitative research in the process. Their conclusions: men, utilizing their generally superior strength, selfishly disregard the plight of the women and children in order to save themselves. They point to the statistical survival rates of women and children in the shipwrecks included in their work. The results are very discouraging for women and children and completely destroy the concept of the chivalrous male. Rather than “women and children first,” the prevailing sentiment in such disasters is truly, “every man for himself,” with the emphasis on men.

Baseball's Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

by Ron Briley

Craig Biggio's first hit of the 2007 season. Credit: Flickr/M. Glasgow.

Law of Slavery Lies at Heart of Both "Lincoln" and "Django"

by Gregory L. Kaster

Appropriately marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, two of the season's Hollywood blockbusters, Quentin Taratino's Django Unchained and Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, are about, respectively, slavery and its abolition. And while they could not be more different in style, tone, and story, the two films are instructively complementary in reminding us of an uncomfortable truth about our nation's past: that underpinning slavery at the local, state, and national levels was the law, including the highest law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.At one level Django, set in 1858 on the eve of the Civil War, can be viewed as simply a prelude to Lincoln. It captures essential realities of slavery, whose permanent demise Lincoln, set in 1865 near war's end, reminds us came through hard-fought pragmatic politics that produced the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Is Christmas a Pagan Holiday?

by Stephen Mitsuo Higa

This canard gets trotted out a lot this time of year.

Revival of 1930s "Golden Boy" Is an Historical Knockout

by Bruce Chadwick

Golden BoyBelasco Theatre111 W. 44th StreetNew York, N.Y.Boxing truly serves as a window on American history, and indeed, many boxers became legends of twentieth-century America: Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and, of course, Muhammad Ali. The 1930s, especially, saw the debut of boxing superstars such as Louis and James Braddock. The sweet science is relatively easy to recreate onscreen (countless boxing films, from Rocky and Raging Bull to the more recent The Fighter have proven that) but, given that one typically doesn't expect an actual boxing match during an evening at the theater, it's harder to recreate onstage.No more. Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, which debuted in 1937 and was revived last week at New York’s Belasco Theatre, is an historical knockout, a tough and powerful drama that captures the sleazy spirit of boxing just before World War II.

"Lincoln's" Unfinished Work

by Patrick Rael

Contemporary print of the first African American voters. Credit: Library of Congress.Amidst the widespread discussions of Steven Spielberg's recent film Lincoln, only a few have sought to place the film within its own tradition of Civil War films. There's nothing new, of course, about focusing a film on the character of Abraham Lincoln, though it has been well over thirty years since a major television or film production took him seriously (Hal Holbrook in Sandburg's Lincoln [1974]).

Actors as Historians

by Jim Cullen

John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Credit: Wiki Commons.The story of this book begins in 2001, when I left academe and began working as a high school teacher. In the process of trying to plan the first semester of a U.S. history survey, I made a curious discovery after generating a slate of movies I planned to show over the course of the fall semester: every one of them starred Daniel Day-Lewis. There was The Crucible. And Last of the Mohicans. And The Age of Innocence. Later I added Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood. All told, there were nine times I ran an annual event I dubbed "The Daniel Day-Lewis Film Festival."

When Will Marvin Miller Be Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame?

by Ron Briley

Marvin Miller in 2003. Credit: Wiki Commons.

Another Christmas Season, Another Production of "A Christmas Carol"

by Bruce Chadwick

A Christmas Carol McCarter Theatre 91 University Place Princeton, N.J.At the end of the first act of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, old curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge tumbles down a hole in the ground in 1843 London. At the beginning of the second act, he falls down from the sky until he lands on the stage.But actually Scrooge, and this entire production of the classic holiday play, tumbles right into our hearts.The play, which opened Friday, begins with bells ringing all over the theater. Then Tiny Tim -- the tiniest Tiny Tim there ever was -- limps to the middle of the stage, leaning on his slender crutch, to look at a decorated Christmas tree on a London street as snow falls. The street is soon filled with people shopping in the middle of the city and the play is off to yet another flying start.The McCarter has produced the play for nearly forty years and no matter whose adaptation they use (this year it’s David Thompson’s) it's a luscious chestnut of a show.

Mayan Apocalypse Watch

by Matthew Restall

Credit: Flickr/Vitor Bellote.You may need to do your holiday shopping a little earlier this month. You will also need to give those gifts sooner. The world is ending four days before Christmas Day. It is not clear what will happen, exactly, on December 21, but we know something is going to happen. In the words of the tagline that promoted Sony Pictures’ movie 2012, the end is “Predicted by Mayans, Confirmed by Science.”

America's Real Religion: Shopping

by Lawrence S. Wittner

An Oregon mall on Black Friday. Credit: Flickr.Although fundamentalist fanatics have been working for decades to turn the United States into a “Christian nation,” they have not had much success along these lines. One reason for their failure is that religious minorities and non-believers have resisted. And another is probably that a large number of Americans want to preserve religious tolerance and avoid theocracy. But it might also reflect the fact that the United States is now firmly in the grip of a different religion: shopping.

Holiday Theater from the Past

by Bruce Chadwick

Credit: Wiki Commons. In December of 1864 the Civil War was winding down, but there was no surrender by the Confederate army. Hundreds of thousands of young men had died and many more had been wounded. The nation, north and south, struggled to survive amid battles and cannon fire. Many Americans reflected on the Christmas spirit that year as the war droned on around them. That is the atmosphere of A Civil War Christmas, a new holiday play, that opens December 4 at the New York Theater Workshop. It is one of a surprisingly large number of history plays tied to the holiday season around the country. “I wanted to stage this play because when you watch the calamities of Christmas, 1864, you think about the troubles we have today. We are still a very divided country, as the election just proved, just as we were divided in 1864. It’s always good to look at a play about the past so you can reflect on what’s going on today. We learn from all history plays,” said Jim Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theater Workshop, which is producing A Civil War Christmas.

A Chilling New Look at Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia

by Bruce Chadwick

The Twenty-Seventh Man New York Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street New York, N.Y.Three Jewish writers are thrown into a dark, dank cell in a Russian prison in the 1950s on the order of Joseph Stalin, the country’s strongman dictator. They do not know anything about there situation except that they are three of twenty-six other Jewish writers and poets, who have been jailed on mysterious charges.As they listen to each other’s stories, they begin to suspect that one of them is an informant for the Soviet secret police, placed in the cell to gain damaging information to be used against them in their trial. Then, without warning, a fourth prisoner, the twenty-seventh man in the group, is thrown into the cell with them. He is Pinchas Pelovitz, a naïve, friendly young man who has never published anything and thinks he was arrested because he had photos of naked women stashed in one of his books.

Dickens's "Drood" is a Winner

by Bruce Chadwick

The Mystery of Edwin Drood Studio 54 W. 54th Street New York, N.Y.The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a musical based on Charles Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, does not start; it erupts. Characters from the cast entertain people in the audience and, as the festivites continue, the noise level rises until you cannot distinguish it from Grand Central Station at rush hour. Then the play, a merry romp through 1895 England, begins to unfold.Edwin Drood was a dashing young man in love with gorgeous blondie Rosa Bud. He disappeared on Christmas Eve, 1895, and was assumed murdered. The play recounts his story, until his demise, and then, in act two, the cast works with the audience to decide who killed poor Edwin.Dickens was about three quarters of the way through The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he died. Rupert Holmes then revised all of it for his 1986 play, revived again last week at Studio 54 in New York, the notorious 1970s hot spot where Liza Minelli, Truman Capote and Bianca Jagger held court and everybody who was anybody danced the night away.

A Little Fire and Brimstone

by Bruce Chadwick

Scandalous: the Life and Times of Aimee Semple McPherson Neil Simon Theater W. 52d St. New York, N.Y.Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was an iconic figure in American religion for more than twenty years. The preacher opened one of the largest churches in the world, the Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles, in 1923, was the first woman to have her own coast-to-coast radio show, published her own magazine, led tour groups to the Holy Land, and was a pop cultural figure known far and wide for several generations.Her life in Hollywood, where she rose to glory, was laced with scandals. She married three times and grabbed worldwide headlines when she was allegedly kidnapped, held for thirty days, fled and turned up unannounced in a little village in Mexico. She was the basis for one of the stars in the film Elmer Gantry.McPherson was the Billy Graham of her era and, in fact, Graham and all modern evangelical preachers and television evangelists based their crusades and television programs on Aimee’s work back in the 1920s.

You Can’t Lose with Little Kids, Dogs or Dick Nixon

by Bruce Chadwick

Checkers Vineyard Theater 108 E. 15th Street New York, N.Y.Whether you loved him or hated him, former president Richard Nixon was a gargantuan character in political history. Nixon, a young California senator, shot to fame in 1952 when General Dwight D. Eisenhower tapped him as his vice presidential running mate on the Republican ticket. As soon as the contest began, the press exposed a “secret fund” backers had raised for Nixon. His friends said it was to cover legitimate campaign expenses and his enemies insisted it was to live extravagantly. Eisenhower told Nixon he had to go on television, a brand new medium in the world in 1952, to refute the charges.Thus was born the famous Checkers speech, a thirty-minute TV appearance that kept Nixon on the ticket, charmed the country and made television history.

How True is "Lincoln"?

by David O. Stewart

Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: "Lincoln": The MovieWith history-minded Americans flocking to see Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln movie, many are beset with questions about the accuracy of some of the neglected facts and episodes featured in the film.

Daniel Day-Lewis's Abe Lincoln: (Racial) Trailblazer

by Jim Cullen

Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: "Lincoln": The MovieCredit: Wiki Commons.