Theater
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The Liberals, III – Dore Schary
This morning, in the wee hours—your editor was suffering from insomnia—the Turner Classic Movies channel aired The Metro Goldwyn Mayer Story, a movie short with Dore Schary, MGM’s vice president in charge of production, announcing the studio’s offerings for 1951. We said this site would explore the different attitudes toward the Soviet Union on the part…
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Tretyakov
Sex, eugenics, and gender battles in early Soviet Russia! That’s the cheery blurb on the handbill of Swarthmore College’s 2002 production of I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov. Tretyakov (1892-1937) wrote the play in 1926. It’s about Milda, a young Latvian woman of humble origins “who is helping to build a new, communist way of life in…
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The Drama of Galileo — and of Losey, Eisler, and Brecht
“I believe in the gentle force of reason; in the long run, no one can resist it. Nobody can watch me drop a pebble and say it doesn’t fall. Nobody can do that. The seduction of truth is too strong.” So says Galileo Galilei in Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. The staged biography by the…
Painting the Culture Red 