Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Yerma and Gobal Village
Posted: January 25, 2014 in UncategorizedTags: Arts, Dil Wickremasinghe, Galway, Max Haffler, National University of Ireland Galway, Town Hall Theatre, Yerma
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yerma-NUI-Galway-2014/1448497575373258 im runnning social media for this gang could you give a like 3 weeks until “Get in” at The Mick Lally excited for cast and crew.
Also coming back from Mass Heard Gobal Village for the 1st time in ages —>
About the show
Global Village is a groundbreaking show which is now in its fourth broadcasting year, airing live to a national audience every Saturday evening 7-9pm. Global Village brings its listeners to the core of the latest social justice stories by hearing from those who are affected by the issues. In doing so we hope to raise awareness and to inspire our listeners to act and be part of the change! Global Village aims to spark social change through thought-provoking discussion of integration, equality, inclusion and social justice stories.
Global Village is a groundbreaking show which is now in its fourth broadcasting year, airing live to a national audience every Saturday evening 7-9pm. Global Village brings its listeners to the core of the latest social justice stories by hearing from those who are affected by the issues. In doing so we hope to raise awareness and to inspire our listeners to act and be part of the change! Global Village aims to spark social change through thought-provoking discussion of integration, equality, inclusion and social justice stories.
“As host of Newstalk’s groundbreaking show Global Village, Dil Wickremasinghe fearlessly tackles a variety of thorny topics” – Sunday Independent (2011)
Awards
- Voice Media Award 2012, (Broadcast Category) – Headline and See Change
- Certificate of Merit 2010 and 2011, Justice Media – Irish Law Society
- Winner of the Broadcast Media 2011 – Media & Multicultural Awards
- Certificate of Merit for MAMA 2008 – Media & Multicultural Awards
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yerma-NUI-Galway-2014/1448497575373258 im runnning social media for this gang could you give a like 3 weeks until “Get in” at The Mick Lally excited for cast and crew.
Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, is a mother and grandmother, a lifelong educator, a proud Blue Star mom, and an active member of her community. As Second Lady, Dr. Biden works to bring attention to the sacrifices made by military families, to highlight the importance of community colleges to America’s future, and to raise awareness around areas of particular importance to women, including breast cancer prevention, all while continuing to teach English full-time at a community college in nearby Virginia.
Dr. Biden has always said that community colleges are “one of America’s best-kept secrets.” As a teacher, she sees how community colleges have changed the lives of so many of her students for the better. As Second Lady, she works to underscore the critical role of community colleges in creating the best, most-educated workforce in the world. Most recently, she traveled across the country as part of the “Community College to Career” tour to highlight successful industry partnerships between community colleges and employers. In the fall of 2010, she hosted the first-ever White House Summit on Community Colleges with President Obama, and she continues to work on this outreach on behalf of the Administration – frequently visiting campuses, meeting with students and teachers, as well as industry representatives around the country.
As a military mom, Dr. Biden understands firsthand how difficult it can be to have a loved one deployed overseas. In Delaware, she was active with a nonprofit organization called Delaware Boots on the Ground, which helps families during times of military deployment by organizing community events to raise awareness and support. As Second Lady, Dr. Biden has dedicated herself to shining a light on military families’ strength and courage as well as the challenges that they face. She travels regularly to military bases in both the United States and abroad to visit with service members and their families.
Dr. Biden’s children’s book – Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops – was released in June 2012. Inspired by real-life events, the book tells the story of a military family’s experience with deployment through the eyes of Dr. Biden’s granddaughter, Natalie, during the year her father is deployed to Iraq. The book also includes resources about what readers can do to support military service members and their families.
Through their Joining Forces initiative, First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Biden have issued a national challenge to all Americans to take action and find ways to support and engage our military families in their own communities. Joining Forces aims to educate, challenge, and spark action from all sectors of our society – citizens, communities, businesses, non-profits, faith based institutions, philanthropic organizations, and government – to ensure military families have the support they deserve. At JoiningForces.gov, Americans can find many ways to take action.
In 1993, after four of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer, Dr. Biden started the Biden Breast Health Initiative in Delaware, which in the past 18 years has educated more than 10,000 high school girls about the importance of early detection of breast cancer. Dr. Biden and the Vice President have also served as the Honorary Co-Chairs for the Global Race for the Cure in Washington, D.C. Dr. Biden continues to stress the importance of breast cancer research and early detection.
Dr. Biden has been an educator for more than three decades. Prior to moving to Washington, D.C., she taught English at a community college in Delaware, at a public high school and at a psychiatric hospital for adolescents. Dr. Biden earned her Doctorate in Education from the University of Delaware in January of 2007. Her dissertation focused on maximizing student retention in community colleges. She also has two Master’s Degrees — both of which she earned while working and raising a family.
Jill and Joe have three children: Ashley, a social worker; Beau, the Attorney General of the State of Delaware and a Major in the Delaware Army National Guard; and Hunter, a lawyer. They have a son-in-law, Howard, two daughters-in-law, Hallie and Kathleen, and are also the proud grandparents of five children: Naomi, Finnegan, Maisy, Natalie, and Hunter. The oldest of five sisters, Jill Jacobs was raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania by Bonny and Donald Jacobs, both of whom are now deceased.
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WITH SYNGE IN CONNEMARA
I had often spent a day walking with John Synge, but a year or two ago I
travelled for a month alone through the west of Ireland with him. He was
the best companion for a roadway any one could have, always ready and
always the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot sun and
the pelting rain. I remember a deluge on the Erris Peninsula, where we
lay among the sand hills and at his suggestion heaped sand upon ourselves
to try and keep dry.
When we started on our journey, as the train steamed out of Dublin, Synge
said: ‘Now the elder of us two should be in command on this trip.’ So we
compared notes and I found that he was two months older than myself. So
he was boss and whenever it was a question whether we should take the
road to the west or the road to the south, it was Synge who finally
decided.
Synge was fond of little children and animals. I remember how glad he was
to stop and lean on a wall in Gorumna and watch a woman in afield
shearing a sheep. It was an old sheep and must have often been sheared
before by the same hand, for the woman hardly held it; she just knelt
beside it and snipped away. I remember the sheep raised its lean old head
to look at the stranger, and the woman just put her hand on its cheek and
gently pressed its head down on the grass again.
Synge was delighted with the narrow paths made of sods of grass alongside
the newly-metalled roads, because he thought they had been put there to
make soft going for the bare feet of little children. Children knew, I
think, that he wished them well. In Bellmullet on Saint John’s eve, when
we stood in the market square watching the fire-play, flaming sods of
turf soaked in paraffine, hurled to the sky and caught and skied again,
and burning snakes of hay-rope, I remember a little girl in the crowd, in
an ecstasy of pleasure and dread, clutched Synge by the hand and stood
close in his shadow until the fiery games were done.
His knowledge of Gaelic was a great assistance to him in talking to the
people. I remember him holding a great conversation in Irish and English
with an innkeeper’s wife in a Mayo inn. She had lived in America in
Lincoln’s day. She told us what living cost in America then, and of her
life there; her little old husband sitting by and putting in an odd word.
By the way, the husband was a wonderful gentle-mannered man, for we had
luncheon in his house of biscuits and porter, and rested there an hour,
waiting for a heavy shower to blow away; and when we said good-bye and
our feet were actually on the road, Synge said, ‘Did we pay for what we
had?’ So I called back to the innkeeper, ‘Did we pay you?’ and he said
quietly, ‘Not yet sir.’
Synge was always delighted to hear and remember any good phrase. I
remember his delight at the words of a local politician who told us how
he became a Nationalist. ‘I was,’ he said plucking a book from the
mantlepiece (I remember the book–it was ‘Paul and Virginia’) and
clasping it to his breast–‘I was but a little child with my little book
going to school, and by the house there I saw the agent. He took the
unfortunate tenant and thrun him in the road, and I saw the man’s wife
come out crying and the agent’s wife thrun her in the channel, and when I
saw that, though I was but a child, I swore I’d be a Nationalist. I swore
by heaven, and I swore by hell and all the rivers that run through them.’
Synge must have read a great deal at one time, but he was not a man you
would see often with a book in his hand; he would sooner talk, or rather
listen to talk–almost anyone’s talk.
Synge was always ready to go anywhere with one, and when there to enjoy
what came. He went with me to see an ordinary melodrama at the Queen’s
Theatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the company
could by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of their
voices hold your attention on a play where everything was commonplace. He
enjoyed seeing the contrite villain of the piece come up from the bottom
of the gulch, hurled there by the adventuress, and flash his sweating
blood-stained face up against the footlights; and, though he told us he
had but a few short moments to live, roar his contrition with the voice
of a bull.
Synge had travelled a great deal in Italy in tracks he beat out for
himself, and in Germany and in France, but he only occasionally spoke to
me about these places. I think the Irish peasant had all his heart. He
loved them in the east as well as he loved them in the west, but the
western men on the Aran Islands and in the Blaskets fitted in with his
humour more than any; the wild things they did and said were a joy to
him.
Synge was by spirit well equipped for the roads. Though his health was
often bad, he had beating under his ribs a brave heart that carried him
over rough tracks. He gathered about him very little gear, and cared
nothing for comfort except perhaps that of a good turf fire. He was,
though young in years, ‘an old dog for a hard road and not a young pup
for a tow-path.’
He loved mad scenes. He told me how once at the fair of Tralee he saw an
old tinker-woman taken by the police, and she was struggling with them in
the centre of the fair; when suddenly, as if her garments were held
together with one cord, she hurled every shred of clothing from her, ran
down the street and screamed, ‘let this be the barrack yard,’ which was
perfectly understood by the crowd as suggesting that the police strip and
beat their prisoners when they get them shut in, in the barrack yard. The
young men laughed, but the old men hurried after the naked fleeting
figure trying to throw her clothes on her as she ran.
But all wild sights appealed to Synge, he did not care whether they were
typical of anything else or had any symbolical meaning at all. If he had
lived in the days of piracy he would have been the fiddler in a pirate-
schooner, him they called ‘the music–‘ ‘The music’ looked on at every
thing with dancing eyes but drew no sword, and when the schooner was
taken and the pirates hung at Cape Corso Castle or The Island of Saint
Christopher’s, ‘the music’ was spared because he _was_ ‘the music.’
Jack B. Yeats
Live from The National Theatre: 50 years on Stage – tonight BBC2 9pm
In a once-in-a-lifetime performance, some of the greatest stars ever seen on stage come together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Theatre.
Featuring Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Maggie Smith, Benedict Cumberbatch, Helen Mirren, James Corden, and many more
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Award-winning playwright to take Listowel by storm (The Kerryman)
Posted: October 6, 2013 in Uncategorizedreaking Good: Broadway’s Golden Age Reborn on Cable
1.
It is hardly news by now that Broadway theater has become a high-priced museum of its former self. This year’s Broadway season, which kicked off earlier this month, will feature a few new plays, including a limited run of Outside Mullingar from Pulitzer-winner John Patrick Shanley in January, but for the most part Broadway theaters will host the usual disheartening mix of jukebox musicals, retooled Disney movies, and revivals of hoary classics populated by downshifting movie stars.
For those who care about theater as an art form, it is this last category, the endless stream of revivals of classic American plays populated by movie stars, that really hurts. Sure, there are theaters off-Broadway and in other cities around the country that still commission and produce new plays, but the Broadway revivals, like the production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie starring Cherry Jones that opened earlier this month, show that there was once a time when serious new plays found favor not just with a small, theater-loving elite, but with a broad cross-section of middle-class America.
My own grandparents, like many educated young people in the 1940s, loved culture and fine things, but they lived in an isolated mill town in Southern Virginia without good bookstores or restaurants, much less a vital theater scene. So, like thousands of their fellow Americans, once or twice a year, they hopped a train to New York to eat a few decent meals, shop at the department stores along Fifth Avenue, and “see the shows,” which for them meant Broadway. This was, for a generation of American provincials like my grandparents, the height of sophistication and an annual ritual that sustained New York theater for decades.
Now that golden age of serious, culturally ambitious drama is gone forever.
Or is it? Certainly, given the sky-high ticket prices and the emphasis on circus-like musicals catering to baby boomer nostalgia, the next generation of great American dramatists like Tennessee Williams or Lorraine Hansberry, whose 1959 classic A Raisin in the Sun is being revived this spring, won’t be returning to Broadway any time soon. But in fact we have a platform for serious, character-driven drama in this country, and it is more popular and broad-based than Broadway ever was. It’s called cable television.
The inexorable slide of quality theater from the cultural mainstream and the rise of cable TV as the defining dramatic art form of the 21st century is a prime example of technological “creative destruction” at work. The theater of Broadway’s Golden Age was indeed terrific stuff, but as a consumer product it was wildly inefficient. Because shows were live and unrecorded, they could be seen by a limited number of people, many of whom had to travel hundreds of miles to get to the theater. Successful Broadway shows spawned touring companies – as hit musicals still do to this day – but such tours are costly to run and audiences in the smaller cities inevitably get a watered-down version of the real thing, with lower quality actors and production values.
Cable shows like Homeland or Breaking Bad, which airs its series finale this Sunday, are cheap and easily accessible to anyone with a subscription to cable or Netflix. More importantly, though, thanks to a complex set of market forces, all the incentives push cable channels to hire top-drawer actors and writers and allow them the artistic freedom to create compelling characters and story lines, much the way the best Broadway plays did half a century ago. This fragile cultural moment won’t last – more on that later – but for now it seems clear that if Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry were writing today they would be showrunners for a cable series, because that’s where the audience is.
2.
You can measure the Golden Age of American theater in many ways, but I would mark it from the 1944 debut of The Glass Menagerie to the opening night of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1962. There were, of course, serious American playwrights before then – Eugene O’Neill is the best-known, but there were plenty of others – but those writers always seemed slightly ahead of the popular culture of their time. Likewise, many great American plays have debuted since 1962, and a select few, like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, became part of the wider national conversation.
But for a short time after the Second World War, American commercial theater hit that elusive sweet spot where popularity meets ambitious social and artistic agendas. In his fascinating 1987 autobiography Timebends, Arthur Miller speaks of this era as
a time when the audience was basically the same for musicals and light entertainment as for the ambitious stuff and had not yet been atomized…So the playwright’s challenge was to please not a small sensitized supporting clique but an audience representing, more or less, all of America.
Miller explains how this broad-based, yet culturally hungry audience shaped the work of the era’s two greatest writers, himself and Tennessee Williams. Both men were, to differing degrees, outsiders to American culture – Williams because he was unapologetically gay, Miller because he was a Jew with strong radical beliefs. In another era, Miller says, they might well have slanted their work to please a minority audience that already agreed with them, but suddenly in the postwar years there was a mainstream audience waiting to hear what they had to say, and being both great artists and profoundly ambitious men, they opened their work outward to a mass audience.
To do that, they didn’t preach to their audiences like Clifford Odets did in his political plays of the 1930s or bash the viewer over the head with a bleak vision the way O’Neill too often does in his plays. Instead, Miller and Williams created characters – indelible, psychologically complex protagonists like the struggling salesman Willy Loman riding on a smile and a shoeshine or the tragic, half-mad Blanche DuBois forever depending on the kindness of strangers. These characters had to be psychologically complex and indelibly drawn because that’s how you appeal to a heterogenous audience not already united by social background or political outlook: you get audiences to care deeply about a character, to see themselves in someone who may not be in any outward way like them. Once you’ve done that, an audience will follow you anywhere.
3.
Interestingly, it wasn’t the movies that put an end to Broadway’s Golden Age. Hollywood’s own Golden Age, stretching from the advent of sound in the late 1920s to the late 1950s, roughly overlaps that of Broadway. No, it was TV that killed the Broadway of Miller’s era – that and probably the jet plane. At a time when the only viable home entertainment was radio and all but the stratospherically rich traveled by train, car, or boat, Broadway theater was part of a broader leisure industry that catered to Americans like my grandparents yearning for cultural experiences they couldn’t enjoy in their own hometowns.
But once the desire for entertainment could be satisfied by a magic box in the living room and a desire for horizon-broadening travel could by satisfied by plane trips to Europe and beyond, Hollywood and Broadway had to adapt or die. They did so by splitting their audiences – “atomizing” them, in Miller’s terms – into high and low. After a decade of trial and error, Hollywood reinvented itself in the 1970s with ambitious, director-driven films like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and money-spinning summer blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars. Broadway did much the same thing, filling the bigger houses with crowd-pleasing musicals like Cats and A Chorus Line while supporting more adventurous, writer-driven work by the likes of David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Wendy Wasserstein.
This worked for a time, thanks in large part to off-Broadway and the regional theater movement, which allowed playwrights to grow their careers at subscription-based resident theaters around the country and then bring their most popular work to New York for a money-making Broadway run. This system, low-paying and outside the mainstream as it was, still made for some pretty terrific theater. Shepard, sustained by a long-running affiliation with San Francisco’s Magic Theater, introduced audiences to his singularly bleak and funny Western vision, while August Wilson, who premiered most of his plays at the Seattle Repertory Theater, opened a window onto working-class black characters quite nearly invisible to the mainstream.
But while regional theater provided an audience for more adventurous fare, unlike in Arthur Miller’s day, it was no longer the same audience that went to see the big musicals. Mamet, Shepard, and Wilson, talented as they were, were no longer writing for “an audience representing, more or less, all of America,” but for the “small sensitized supporting clique” that Miller saw as an artistically narrowing force. And then, lo and behold, the free market worked its magic. As Broadway ticket prices escalated to pay for ever more lavish, spectacle-driven musicals, it became harder to persuade theatergoers, even the ones who like the more ambitious stuff, to risk several hundred dollars on a new play.
4.
Enter Carrie Bradshaw and Tony Soprano. Gallons of ink have been spilled, and thousands of terabytes expended, trying to explain why audiences have become so obsessed with characters on modern cable shows, but as Adam Davidson demonstrates in a December 2012 New York Times “It’s the Economy” column, the answer has more to do with business models than any quirk of culture. When there were only three major networks, programming success depended on producing a great number of shows that were just incrementally better than what was on the two other networks, which inevitably led to the creation of a vast wasteland of expensively bland mediocrity.
But once cable blew up the TV dial, giving viewers hundreds of channels to choose from, programmers had to shift their strategy. Now, it wasn’t enough to be just a little better than the competition; now, your shows had to be a lot better. You didn’t have to come up with a huge number of great shows, just one or two at a time would do, but they had to be so good that viewers would become obsessed with the characters and story lines to the point that they would shun cable providers that didn’t carry the channels where those shows appeared.
In other words, out of the morass of network TV, the very technology that ended Broadway theater’s Golden Age, came a sort of small-screen Broadway in which a few big talents – David Simon of The Wire, Lena Dunham of Girls, Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad, and so on – have been given wide artistic latitude to create characters and stories audiences will care about. Because cable providers often operate as near-monopolies, the average cable bill has doubled in the past decade, and viewers pay close to $90 billion a year for cable service. That is a huge pot of money, and for many cable companies nearly half of their revenue is pure profit, so there is an enormous incentive to get the formula right.
But as Davidson points out in his Times column, this fragile model is already fraying at the seams. So far at least, cable subscribers aren’t canceling in large numbers, but as piracy becomes more pervasive, fewer younger people are signing up for cable in the first place. “When people in their 20s move out of their parents’ house or dorm room, they are less likely to get into the habit of paying for cable,” he writes. “If they get addicted to Breaking Bad, they’ll often download it free through file-sharing services like Bit Torrent or wait for it to come out on iTunes.” To make up for lost revenue, cable providers have to jack up rates, which drives more new viewers away, setting up a vicious spiral that, according to one industry expert Davidson spoke to, could cause the entire edifice to collapse as early as 2016.
What comes after that? The short answer is nobody knows. It could get seriously messy there for a while, leading millions of Breaking Bad and Mad Men obsessives to bore their children with talk of the Golden Age of Cable. But if this history teaches us anything, it is that there is always going to be a sizeable audience that cares about quality drama enough to pay real money for it. After all, in the 1940s, Broadway’s principal competition was local amateur productions and guys on their front porches telling funny stories – a sort of analog version of today’s BitTorrent downloads and YouTube cat videos. My grandfather, who told some pretty funny stories himself, was willing to plunk down serious money to take his family to New York for a few good meals and a chance to see the best writers and performers of his age. I have no idea what entertainment technology will look like when my future grandchildren begin to hunger for something more edifying than a quick joke or a funny story, but my bet is they will be able to find it if they are willing to pay for it.
Image via studentrush.org
From December 22, 2011 through December 30, 2011 a FREE download of Transfer of Power will be available through Kindle, Nook, Apple and Kobo. The FREE ebook will include an exclusive and extended free preview of Kill Shot. Just search for Transfer of Power on any of the aformentioned eReaders to take advantage of this offer. (this offer does not extend to any print versions of Transfer of Power.)
The View from The DJ booth 