Word: newes
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...trouble with most new plays I see these days - not just commercial fare but also the supposedly more adventurous work off-Broadway - is that they are too simple: the characters too familiar, the stories too formulaic, the messages too spoon-fed. Donald Margulies' new Broadway offering, Time Stands Still, to take a typical example, won warm praise from most critics, but I found its alternately jokey and sanctimonious portrayal of a photojournalist and her war-correspondent boyfriend one giant media-friendly cliché. And I had to laugh at New York Times critic Ben Brantley's praise of Next Fall...
Come again? From where I sit, smart, sensitive, utterly contemporary New York comedies are virtually all we get these days: plays populated by the same modern, upper-middle-class urban sophisticates who, for the most part, are sitting in the audience. What you rarely get - but do in When the Rain Stops Falling, an extraordinary new play by Australian Andrew Bovell now having its U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater - is something that really throws the audience out of its comfort zone. This challenging play has the most complicated time-shifting dramatic structure I've seen...
...late March a star urban planner named Toni Griffin will begin a new assignment. She'll help lead what might be the most ambitious urban makeover in American history - the downsizing of Detroit, a city built to accommodate a population more than twice its current size. At a recent panel convened by TIME and the Brookings Institution, Mayor Dave Bing made clear what many had suspected - that he intends to shrink the city, which cannot afford to serve dying neighborhoods...
...city is finally starting to see movement. Major efforts are under way to consolidate neighborhoods (one-third of Detroit's residential parcels are vacant lots or empty homes), close failing schools (one-third of Detroit children attend schools that rank among the state's bottom 5%), invest in new-economy job creation (one-quarter of Detroiters are officially unemployed) and improve its woeful public-transportation system. (See pictures of school kids in Detroit...
...great hope for Iraq's March 7 national elections was that could they could restore faith in the democratic process, and set a new tone of national purpose in Baghdad's corridors of power. The great fear was that without clear winners and losers, the elections could produce months of bitter infighting, heightening the sectarian and ethnic tensions behind the civil war that broke out after the 2005 election. And 10 days after the polls closed, with partial results tricking in and about 80% of the vote counted, Iraq appears destined for more trouble...