Word: rain
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...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...
...disorientation starts in the very first minute. The play opens in the future - the year 2039, according to the program - as an elderly man stands amid an apocalyptic deluge of rain, and a fish falls out of the sky. We then move back and forth in time, in seemingly random order, with characters from different time periods - sometimes older and younger versions of the same person - often overlapping on the stage. Only gradually do the stories emerge of two apparently unrelated families, one in London and one in Australia, who have been scarred in different ways by tragedy and abandonment...
...Park, dramatizes the racial changes in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood by twinning two scenes 50 years apart: the arrival of the neighborhood's first black family in 1959 and the invasion of the first gentrifying white couple in the now all-black neighborhood in 2009. But When the Rain Stops Falling goes far beyond such schematic parallelism. Bovell's time-hopping structure is intricate but surprisingly natural - never strained or purposely obfuscating. Rather, as in the works of Faulkner, it is a powerful metaphor for the impossibility of escaping the past, for the way we are all shaped...
...good thing the unofficial motto of the u.s. Postal Service--"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"--doesn't mention Saturday mail delivery. Because that may soon be history. On March 2, Postmaster General John Potter announced that major cuts, including an end to weekend service, would be needed to prevent a projected $238 billion loss over the next decade that is largely a result of fewer letters and packages being sent. It's the first time in USPS history that a lack of mail...
...USPS: e-mail, which is faster, easier and free. That, coupled with the fact that 4 out of 5 households with Internet access now pay bills online, has left mail carriers out in the cold. In 2009 alone, post offices saw a 13% drop in mail volume. Forget rain or gloom of night--it's the act of clicking Send billions of times a day that may finally stay those trusty couriers...