Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hwang's play was based on the incredible-but-true story of a French diplomatic attache in Beijing who conducted a 17-year sexual affair with a Chinese spy posing as an opera singer and never suspected that the lady was a man. (According to Liaison, Joyce Wadler's fascinating new biography of the diplomat, the opera singer was able to fold his genitals inside his body, thus giving the naked illusion of femininity.) From this International Enquirer item, Hwang spun a phantasm of multiple myopia: a man preposterously blinded by love, a European culture blinkered by imperialist prejudice...
...stage, John Dexter's sumptuously stylized production transformed tabloid headlines into a potent truism: that the heart sees what it sees. Onscreen, the opera singer's gender is never in question; his 5 o'clock shadow gives him away to everyone but the diplomat. Jeremy Irons tries manfully, and John Lone womanfully, to give real life to the characters, but the close-ups defeat them. So do some unlikely plot points: the defendant and his accuser are put alone to undress and wrestle in a police wagon; the diplomat daubs himself as Madama Butterfly before a rapt audience -- of French...
Neither did Eduard Shevardnadze, the courtly head of state who has been struggling to hold Georgia together since he took office last year. The intervening 18 months have taxed the talents of the consummate diplomat with a series of crippling crises: economic collapse, political chicanery, ethnic rebellion and even a guerrilla-style insurgency waged by the country's former President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, whose lust for power remains undampened by the popular coup that deposed him nearly two years ago. The revolt in Abkhazia, where a small minority of ethnic separatists want an independent state, has put the fate of Georgia...
...Cairo lawyer who represents many of the militants arrested in the past two years, claims that 20,000 Egyptians fought alongside the mujahedin. The government's experts put the figure closer to 2,500 and say that as many as half of them have returned home. A senior Western diplomat in Cairo insists that both estimates are too high. He says 2,500 Arabs went to Afghanistan and that only about 200 Egyptians received combat training and returned to fight their government. Even so, says the diplomat, "it only takes a few to create the myth." In Algeria several hundred...
...former diplomat leads a last-ditch defense against rebels...