Word: anacostia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...obtain self-rule until 1974. In recent years, Washington once earned the dubious honor of being the murder capital of the U.S., and it mimics the Third World with its two distinct societies: the affluence of the mostly white northwest and the equally extreme poverty of mostly black Anacostia, where infant mortality is twice the national average...
...nation's poorer areas, however -- places like Washington's Anacostia neighborhood, the hollows of Appalachia or Miami's Liberty City -- families with IBM Activas, NEC CD-ROM drives, modems, Internet connections and all the other paraphernalia so beloved by computer users are few and far between. Therein lies one of the most troubling aspects of the emerging information age. In an era in which success is increasingly identified with the ability to use computers and gain access to cyberspace, will the new technology only widen the gap between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, blacks, whites and Hispanics? As Commerce...
...remarkable thing about Community Carol is not, however, what it says but who is performing it. The cast of 30 includes equal numbers of professional actors and members of Washington's impoverished Anacostia neighborhood, an area pioneered by slaves working farms they had bought in secret, and so long benighted that some areas lacked electricity in the 1930s. The amateurs are not stereotypical victims or lowlifes: while some come from straitened circumstances, one is a Berkeley-educated attorney, others are students at a selective high school for the performing arts, and one is a former seminarian who does managerial tasks...
...noble aims and aggressive attitudinizing are both in evidence in Community Carol. Says Rauch, who directed and co-wrote: "We started years ago in places where the barriers were geographic. In cities some communities can be just as isolated because of other factors. We could tell Anacostia was responding because 270 people, by far a record for us, showed up for auditions. Urban work seems to be our future...
...crutches with no teeth wouldn't get cast. When they called me back, I thought it was just keeping up appearances." Brooks is a natural, with a commanding presence and instant believability. He is enough at ease offstage to question the script's accuracy about Anacostia, where he has lived since he was three: "We didn't have any rich black man, mean or otherwise. This play deals in pleasant generalities without getting down to the aches and pains...