Word: jonestown
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...much to minorities. Now, in a speech delivered to an Akron business group, he has accused Democratic Presidential Candidate Jesse Jackson, former National Urban League President Vernon Jordan and N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Benjamin Hooks of encouraging blacks to vote for the losing party, thus leading them into a "political Jonestown." "No more Kool-Aid," said Pendleton, who is black, referring to the cyanide-laced drink that killed the Rev. Jim Jones' followers in 1978. "We want to be free...
Black liberals were put out by Pendleton's attack. Said Hooks: "The black community has heard the conservative gospel and rejected it." Pendleton also drew fire from Republican Francis Guess, a commission member and Tennessee's commissioner of labor. "The Jonestown analogy was disgusting." said Guess. "And I would be surprised if the President would applaud...
...JONESTOWN EXPRESS by James Reston...
...which premiered last week at Providence's Trinity Square Repertory Theater, flounders somewhat as it butts against the incomprehensibility of the tragedy. But at a time when dramatists are shying away from "big" social issues (or muddling them, as in Arthur Kopit's End of the World), Jonestown Express exhibits some admirable qualities: a bold conception, provocative ideas and the ability to give those ideas theatrical life...
James Reston Jr., a journalist who chronicled the Jonestown story in his 1981 book Our Father Who Art in Hell, collaborated on the drama with Trinity Artistic Director Adrian Hall. The result is a some times unwieldy mélange of docudrama, sociological argument, fragmented monologues and musical interludes. This stylization moves the play closer to Brechtian irony than to Greek tragedy. Jones, played with grim conviction by Richard Kneeland, is not a satanic Pied Piper but a drug-addicted preacher with delusions of grandeur. His followers are not pathetic flotsam but all too recognizable products...