Trump's sidelined In Suzan-Lori Parks' wise & entertaining 100 Plays for the 1st Hundred Days

Excerpt

Day 63: March 23

FORMER RUSSIAN MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, DENIS VORONENOV, WAS SHOT DEAD IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

Jack
Former Russian MP, Denis Voronenkov, an outspoken opponent of Vladimir Putin, was shot dead outside a hotel today. He had fled to Kiev in fear of his life and to help with inquiries into Russia's incursions into the Ukraine.

The 45th
I thought your plays were going to be about me? This doesn't have anything to do with me.

Jill
It will. Just wait.

Trump's sidelined in Suzan-Lori Park's wise and entertaining 100 PLAYS for the FIRST HUNDRED DAYS (Theatre Communications Group. In this slim, 93 page book, we, the thinking public, are the main attraction, while Trump skirts the sidelines perplexed he's not the mainattraction.

In this intelligent darkly funny book, people of good will with humanist values assumed to be universal, find themselves in dystopian land. Stunned like Alice, we identify this strange new place, trying to define the shape of things to come.

Yet Parks, Pulitzer prize winner of TOPDOG/UNDERDOG takes the long view. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she tries on the idea that politics is a pendulum, not about right or left or leaders. Parks' astute examination of who we are now and how we got here, concludes with an optimistic assessment of "WE THE PEOPLE."-- The American character in the larger sense.

I found this book a refreshing antidote to the senseless 24-7 assault of Trump News. Parks has written a kind of Pilgrim's Progress through our current psychological plague.

 I have often wished the newsmedia might consider taking control of their medium. Suppose at say 7PM, they programmed a half hour of Trump news, rather than alerts throughout the news day. Without burnout from the day's choreographed distractions, people might actually tune in for a real news perspective.

S.W.



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