My husband and I have also been attending performances of contemporary drama. Last weekend we saw Red at Arena Stage, another impressive venue. This venue, however, is quite 21st century.
Red's subject matter is also quite modern and fits into our course nicely. The play is about modern artist Mark Rothko.
You may prefer to see his distinctive paintings in color.
The play is set in the late 1950s when Rothko was completing a commission to paint murals for The Four Seasons, a very expensive restaurant in NYC. Rothko's style of painting was also being challenged by the work of artists such as Andy Warhol. In the play itself, Rothko and his assistant, Ken, a young artist, battle over art and its meaning. I wonder how this play would work as drama read in a class like EN 230. However, visual and aural elements that may be difficult to convey on the page are so important to this play in particular. (It is set in Rothko's studio, a capacious loft with much equipment and many paintings in progress.) Also, as my brother-in-law pointed out to me, this play would be difficult to stage in many settings and requires a venue and company like Arena Stage or its equivalent. For more information, see this article from The NY Times:The scene below is from Arena Stage.
Even the paint that Rothko and Ken throw around the stage requires technical know-how. After all, oil paint is very permanent. Yet, in one scene, Ken cleans it up very quickly.
For reviews of Red at Arena Stage, see the following links:
Links to reviews of other productions are below:
For information about Rothko, see the links below:
And what did happen to the murals that Rothko was supposed to paint for the Four Seasons:
To finish, here are links to videos and articles about what it is like to perform in Red.
The scene below is from Boston's Speakeasy Theater:
The works of the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o have intrigued me for a while because, for the past thirty-plus years, he has chosen to write them in Gikiyu, an African language, rather than in English. Gikiyu being his first language, he believes that it is more appropriate for his writing and for African literature. He views English as a colonizers' language that has been imposed on him. (He and Chinua Achebe disagree on this.) However, NwT is his own translator, which solves some of the problems of transmission. (Note that Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, chose to write in English, rather than in Polish, and that he did not translate his own works into his first language.)
Below is a picture of a woman picking tea in Limuru, NwT's hometown. I was surprised to see that it was less than twenty miles from Nairobi, Kenya's capital. 
This summer I was able to read NwT's novel, Petals of Blood. This book is the last one he composed in English. It is set in Ilmorog, a fictional Kenyan village that becomes a boomtown over the course of the novel. Events take place during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after Kenya becomes independent. Ostensibly, the story is something of a murder mystery as at the beginning, three wealthy men have been killed in a fire. However, NwT's narrative focuses more on the paths that four friends take over the course of a dozen years. These friends are Munira, a teacher from a wealthy family; Wanja, a businesswoman who becomes the madam of a brothel; Abdulla, Wanja's former partner; and Karega, a union organizer whom she once loved. Each man is a suspect in the deaths of the three wealthy men, and each of the wealthy men was involved with Wanja. (The fire occurred at her mansion.) Interestingly, NwT finished up this novel in 1977 at a Soviet writers' colony. (The USSR hadn't yet fallen.)
Just in time for the midterm, I'd like to return to this entry. If you are going to respond to essay prompt #2, you may want to know a little more about post-colonial writers. We've read Things Fall Apart, a pioneering example of post-colonial writing, but you may want to know what else is out there.
Every year the Smithsonian holds a folklife festival at the mall. It focuses on three different cultures and is a great opportunity to dabble in these cultures' music and foods. This year the featured cultures were African-American (with a focus on the oral tradition), Central & South American (with an emphasis on music), and Welsh.
Here are a few links to their YouTube videos:
As you can see from the map above, Wales is a part of Great Britain or the U.K.. The picture above the map shows that Wales can be a very picturesque and rural area. Of course, some of it is quite urban or suburban. We also learned from a member of the Centre for Alternative Technology that the Welsh have been very active in the environmental movement, keeping his organization going throughout the 1980s and 1990s to today.
