notanotherbookreview

  THE BRONZE BOY by Nancy Hamada, directed by Todd Faulkner. Cast included August Kiss Fegley, Nicole Greevy and Todd Faulkner. The production was showcased in "East of Edinburgh" at 59 E.59th Street, one of 6 plays selected for Edinburgh's Fringe Festival. The 59th Street venue offered an opportunity to stage shows prior to the festival. It's an unusual opportunity in the United States. Unlike Britain, there is no National Theater to provide festival opportunities for new plays, let alone venues to showcase them.  THE BRONZE BOY is a surprisingly funny, nuanced and serious play about America's love-hate relationship with guns, explored in a road trip. This meandering journey on our highways is a visit to our hidden gun culture. We see headlines in America, telegraphed shots of life and death madness, but rarely stories of our subterranean inheritance. Our relationship to guns is largely ignored in news culture, which emphasizes senselessness over the hidden ...

  I recently learned that The Grapes of Wrath , John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, is now a banned book. It is more than ironic that a book celebrating American grit in the inhumanly gruelling time of the Great Depression is banned in 2022, a time of unprecedented national hardship. In Grapes , The Joads, a family of tenant farmers, flee their Oklahoma home amid drought, poverty and bank foreclosures that make survival untenable. There is no hope in the Dust Bowl and, like thousands of others, they've seen handbills advertising jobs in California.   The story begins as Tom Joad, paroled from prison, where he was incarcerated for a homicide in self-defense, is hitch-hiking home. He meets a preacher, who he remembers from childhood, and they travel together. Tom finds the farm home deserted and goes to his uncle's, where the family is staying after the banks evicted all the farmers. Tom's family is loading what possessions remain into a Sedan-truck, when he arrives. The farm ...