Word: townes
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...Scarborough, everyone knows who Alan is. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn was an 18-year-old actor when he first came to this resort town on the coast of North Yorkshire, England, in the 1950s and joined a theater company run by Stephen Joseph, Britain's pioneer of theater-in-the-round. After starting to write his own plays, then working as a radio-drama producer for the bbc, Ayckbourn returned to Scarborough, where in 1972 he became artistic director and chief playwright-in-residence for what is now called the Stephen Joseph Theatre. It is there that nearly...
Indeed, it's those populist, regional roots that helped shape Ayckbourn's aesthetic: his commitment to exploring serious and subtle themes without abandoning his primary job of keeping an audience entertained. "I grew up in this little town writing for a theater that relies entirely on its audience to survive," he says. "It's not just a matter of making them laugh. It's giving them a reason to want to stay in the theater." He's been able to keep them in the theater with less apparent effort than almost anyone writing today. And even if the folks...
...efficient if, ultimately, rather empty Olympics - because of visa restrictions that kept out many tourists, along with potential demonstrators - you can bet that Shanghai will give a warmer welcome to the world. After all, it was the influx of foreigners during the 19th century that turned a Chinese fishing town into the international hub of hedonism. And that's a status Shanghai isn't going to surrender to its dowdier national capital without a fight...
...truce, many Bolivians see the political violence that has shaken their country over the past week as the opening salvos of a civil war. "There isn't a bone in her body that's not broken," says Narda Baqueros, a mother of three who traveled 15 hours to the town of Cobija to retrieve the body of her niece Belki Paz Baqueros on Monday. In her mid-20s and three months pregnant, Belki was beaten to death early Friday morning by opponents of Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales. "Everyone is armed and everyone is saying this is war," Baqueros...
...parents of sickened babies are demanding a greater response. "Sanlu is a big company and we trusted their products. We never dreamed that they would sell something so poisonous," says a mother in Xuzhou, a town in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Her 21-month-old son, who drank Sanlu powdered milk since birth, was just diagnosed with kidney stones. "What angers me the most is that Sanlu had known about it for so long," says the mother, who would only give her surname Zeng. "When I called Sanlu, they told me, 'The country will take care...