Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SECRET HISTORY by Paul Theroux (Putnam; $21.95). Theroux has grown famous writing both novels and travel books. Now he produces an entertaining fiction about a man who does both, a teasingly autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young stud...
...born Orkache (pronounced Wu-er-kai-she as transliterated into Chinese) Dawlat in Beijing on Feb. 17, 1968, a native Uighur, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, when an aging Mao Zedong fomented social unrest in the name of class struggle. A family portrait shows Wuer, age 1, holding up a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Throughout the rigors of the period, his father remained a loyal member of the party who spent years translating the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao from Chinese into Uighur. When thousands of China's intellectuals were forced...
...precocious child who read insatiably, Wuer often visited his grandparents in Xinjiang, near the Soviet border, to learn Uighur. But he spent most of his boyhood and school years in Beijing in an apartment adorned by a portrait of Mao put there by his father...
...family moved to Urumqi in Xinjiang. On Wuer's bedroom wall hung a portrait of the ancient poet Qu Yuan. Wuer began to write poetry, and took part in school affairs. He helped edit the school newspaper, an experience friends believe developed his interest in freedom of the press. In the summers he went on school field trips into the mountains to stay with the cossack herdsmen. That too left an impression. "He could tell the difference between the life of the ordinary people and the life of the leaders, and he got ideas from these people," said a friend...
Marlane Meyer's The Geography of Luck, on another stage at the same theater, is an adroitly crafted portrait of assorted drifters, losers and desert rats that starts out sourly Sam Shepardesque yet ends in an eerie and touching echo of Saroyan's affirmative The Time of Your Life. But Roberta Levitow, normally a talented director, gave every scene the same pace and texture and allowed the frequent scene changes to dissipate energy and tension. Fortunately for Meyer, a staging under different direction is planned for this summer at Los Angeles Theater Center...