Word: gilead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also the narrator, and the events that led to her current condition must be pieced together from memories she has been conditioned to forget. The & United States of America is now the Republic of Gilead, a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy that arose after "they shot the president and machine- gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time." The current regime is militantly opposed to the recent past, especially all traces of the moral permissiveness that arose in the U.S. during the waning decades of the 20th century...
...Handmaid's Tale will be taken in some quarters as a feminist parable or rallying cry. What is Offred, after all, if not an embodiment of woman subjugated to the power of men? In truth, Atwood's vision is considerably more complex than that. For the Republic of Gilead has come about, in part, with the help of women. Offred's memories of childhood include the time that her mother, an ardent feminist, took her to a ceremonial burning of pornographic magazines...
...dressed in the same fashion; she's holding a stick, no, it's part of a banner, the handle. The camera pans up and we see the writing, in paint, on what must have been a bed sheet: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT." Now there are no sleazy districts in Gilead. A woman can walk in public without being whistled at or worse. Offred wonders what her mother, if still alive, thinks about the new Puritanism: "Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant...
Energy−atomic, unharnessed, virulent−abounds in Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company revival of Balm in Gilead, the Lanford Wilson dope opera that was first produced in 1965. The set may depict a grungy, all-night coffee shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, but it soon takes on the sulfurous glow of the lower depths: a rush-hour subway car, say, some time during World War III. Junkies, hookers, drag queens, derelicts, ganefs and hit men rub up against Joe (Danton Stone) and Darlene (Laurie Metcalf), a couple too amiable or dense to survive the Nighttown...
...founders of Steppenwolf, an admirable community of switch-hitting theater folk in business for a decade and lately receiving wider acclaim for their Manhattan transfers of Sam Shepard's True West and C.P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang ... The director of Balm in Gilead is John Malkovich, who now seems on the springboard to stardom with his roles in Broadway's Death of a Salesman and the film Places in the Heart. In his liberal adaptation of Wilson's text, Malkovich has shown some up-front ingenuity: spotlighting or freeze-framing a conversation, orchestrating...