Word: shock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...increasingly difficult to tell Old and New Worlds apart. With their coffee chains and street-fashion boutiques, malls in Mumbai and Beijing are polished facsimiles of those in the U.S., and when half the world is tuned into reruns of Friends, or The Simpsons, who actually suffers from culture shock anymore...
...comedy is McDonagh's signature. He can shock an audience into laughing at just about anything (suicide, patricide, terrorism, famine), and his expletive-ridden dialogue - its cadence and Celtic slang borrowed from his Irish background - can make even the most banal comment sound like a punch line. Audiences first fell for McDonagh's gritty, witty brand of theater in 1996, when his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane - about the love-hate relationship between a spinster and her domineering mother - won the then 26-year-old a handful of awards and the first of many Tony nominations. Since then...
That conflict, which began in 1808 and pitted ragtag bands of peasants against Napoleon's imperial army, provides the bicentennial occasion for "Goya in Times of War." But in no sense is the show a commemoration of the glories of battle. "For Goya the war was a disaster, a shock for his nation and a shock to his Enlightenment ideas," says Manuela Mena, the exhibition's curator. "You can see his skepticism, his loss of faith in humanity...
...skeletal paupers begging miserably for scraps, "Disasters" exposes the lingering effects - moral, social and physical - of violence. Even for an audience accustomed to the barrage of brutal images emanating from Iraq and Afghanistan, these works, with their rough lines and muted colors, still - amazingly - possess the power to shock...
...Spanish feminists, the small shock of that moment is exactly the point. "It's an important image precisely because it conveys normality," says Marisa Sotelo, president of the Madrid' based Women's Foundation. "It serves a pedagogic function: it shows that women can be and are everywhere...