Word: watch
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...market turmoil, job losses, a discredited Administration and foreign policy meltdown, what could be a better symbol for our depressed and divided nation? Two legendarily awful clubs from economically hurting swing states, battling it out for the championship of a past-its-prime sport while the rest of us watch football highlights. Philadelphia--my city--hasn't won a championship of any kind for 25 years, a record for a four-sport town. Tampa Bay has a shorter history of woe, but this is a city (well, technically, a body of water) whose football team, the Buccaneers, lost the first...
...vision has never been much in need of this kind of enlarging. Her work has always been epic in scope. In Beloved, Morrison told the story of Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see her sold into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a mother do the opposite--she puts her daughter Florens up for sale: "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter." It's a less bloody moment, but in its way it's no less chilling. A Mercy is that daughter's tale...
...Black Watch, a galvanizing, free-form stage piece from the National Theatre of Scotland (it debuted in 2006 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has toured Britain, Australia and three U.S. cities), is the highlight of a remarkable recent surge of plays about the Iraq war. Hollywood, traditionally the go-to vehicle for telling war stories, had its own flurry of interest but after a few star-studded box-office underperformers (In the Valley of Elah, Redacted and, most recently, Body of Lies) has largely retreated to its foxhole. Theater has stepped into the breach, using an impressive arsenal...
...Black Watch is a subtler and more powerful picture of men in war. It too is a docuplay, written by Gregory Burke, from interviews with members of the Black Watch regiment--a storied Scottish fighting unit that dates back to the early 1700s. But what could have been dry and didactic is transformed by a host of inventive, kinetic environmental-theater devices: strobe-and-sound effects to simulate the shock of battle, video screens, interludes of traditional Scottish military songs, evocatively choreographed group movement. In one sequence, soldiers silently pass letters from home to one another, reading and weaving about...
...Black Watch soldiers don't hate war; they hate the war they've been thrust into, in which their traditions mean nothing, the enemy can't be understood, and--the final insult and the cause of much controversy in Scotland--their unit is broken up. "It takes 300 years to build an army that's admired and respected around the world," an officer says. "But it only takes two years pissing about in the desert in the biggest Western foreign policy disaster ever to f___ it up completely." The result, after an hour and 50 minutes with these proud, profane...