Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

September 26, 2026

Drop by Drop Upon the Heart: On the Kennedy Center, the Kennedys’ Classics, and What a Nation Owes its Dead

On the afternoon of December 19, 2025, the board of the Kennedy Center voted to put a living president’s name on a dead president’s memorial. By evening, the letters were on the marble. A congresswoman who sits on that board by law tried to speak. They muted her microphone and called the vote unanimous. Chuck Redd, the jazz drummer who had played Christmas Eve at the center for years, saw the new name on the website, then on the building itself. He canceled within hours. Two years of this, in one afternoon: the inheritance retitled behind closed doors, the objection silenced, the musicians out in the cold.

Continue reading → Drop by Drop Upon the Heart: On the Kennedy Center, the Kennedys’ Classics, and What a Nation Owes its Dead

August 31, 2026

Jury Duty: Theatre You Cannot Leave

The envelope looks like a bill and behaves like a warrant. It arrives in the plain mail between a seed catalog and a credit offer, your name printed the way only a government database can print it, and inside is a summons: report to the courthouse on a Monday in March, at half past eight in the morning, prepared to stay. You did not audition for this production. You signed no contract, negotiated no fee, read no script. The paper tells you what happens if you ignore it, and what happens is contempt: a fine, a cell, or both. Of all the performances running in America, this is the only one that conscripts its audience. By the end of the week you may be deciding whether a stranger loses liberty, money, children, or, in the courtrooms that still ask the question, life. The republic keeps one room in which that decision belongs to twelve people who did not volunteer that morning, and every seat in that room is filled by force of law.

Continue reading → Jury Duty: Theatre You Cannot Leave

April 25, 2011

When Did the Playwright Decide His Own Life Was Worth Examining in a Play?

When did the Playwright turn away from others as a topic of his plays and turn into himself to become the Autobiographer of his own wishes, dreams and experiences on stage? The Amazing Howard Stein and I recently shared a conversation on this topic and Howard wondered if the first instance could be found in Aeschylus who wrote “The Persians” in 472 BC.