Shouts from a Third Act

Inherit the Wind performed at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, Dallas, TX

Kevin Moriarty, Artistic Director Dallas Theatre Center

Something extraordinary is happening at a house that Frank Lloyd Wright built. The house is the Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas, the only free-standing theatre in the country built by the legendary architect. The extraordinary play is Inherit the Wind, which became an instant classic during its national debut on another small stage in Dallas in January 1955. Three months later it was on Broadway, and a few years after that it became an Oscar-nominated film starring Spencer Tracy. If you didn’t see any of those, you might have seen a production at your local high school.

So why is a play based on the real-life Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925 (religion vs. evolution) still relevant today? Because it’s a metaphor for the Right to Think.

The photograph above tells you all you need to know about the current production in Dallas. No traditional courtroom setting, no period costumes. The one larger-than-life character you see is an African-American actress playing the part of Bible-thumping attorney and 3-time Presidential candidate Matthew Harrison Brady (based on Williams Jennings Bryant, who faced off against another superstar of the day, Clarence Darrow). That’s right: a woman playing a man. His wife is played by a man. Why the cross-gender casting? Not for any political or social agenda, but I’ll get to that in a moment. The play, stripped of its traditional moorings, makes the audience find its anchor by focusing on the dialog. And the dialog grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you hard (as did the performances). Many in the audience stayed for a Late-Night talk with some of the actors. We were liberals and conservatives; young, old and middle-aged; affluent and not-affluent. The consensus: these change-ups (cast and set) made us listen to the dialog in a fresh way. On its surface the play debates creationism (as told in the Bible) vs. evolution (as explained by scientist Charles Darwin), but, in the words of one of the playwrights, “it’s not about science vs. religion. It’s about the right to think.”

“You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think–so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies too!” Rachel, a young school teacher in the play. She’s in love with the teacher on trial for teaching evolution, and she’s also the daughter of a local minister.

One of the first things the play made me think about is the current debate over Climate Change. And what about Fake News? Republicans and Democrats both cry “fake news”, and the fact is it does exist. As human beings blessed with the ability to think, we’re in a position to sort through the news, separate fact from fiction, and zero in on the truth. Are we doing that to the best of our ability? You’ve probably heard about Macedonia, a small country in the Balkans, where Fake News is big business. Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, but good jobs for young people are hard to come by. The town of Veles (population about 50,000) is home to over 100 websites dedicated to Fake News. Why? Because it pays. Facebook is the big engine that drives most traffic to news websites all over the world. When people visit these websites, which also contain ads, Google AdSense pays the website owner for each click. The more clicks the better for the owner. One underemployed young person in Veles figured this out. Others followed. They’ve bought domain names that sound legit and have been fooling people around the world ever since, including some main stream media outlets. These Balkan entrepreneurs don’t have a political agenda. They just publish the kind of fake news that draws the most hits. But here’s the thing. Most of this fake news is spread by social media and sometimes on TV. Newspaper readership is down, but it should really be up in a world where people want to think–where they choose to think. I don’t think the mainstream news media is our enemy. Sure there are overzealous reporters, just as there are overzealous businesspeople, lobbyists and you-name-it. Our Founding Fathers determined that a free press was essential to a democratic society. And a free press needs readers–the kind that think.

Back to the play. Kevin Moriarty explained his decision for the cross-gender casting in the Playbill. From “Ancient Greece to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Theatre, female characters were portrayed by male actors.” While there were complicated social and political reasons why this was done, the tradition continued. By the 19th Century, Sarah Bernhardt was travelling the world playing classic roles written for men, including Hamlet. Today, he says, all-female or all-males casts are common in classical and contemporary theater, and it’s not uncommon for an actor of one race to portray a character of a different race. “Audiences will have different responses,” he says, but this is “preferable to a dull night of seeing a play performed as a lifeless copy of previous productions from decades earlier.”

Maybe you don’t live in Dallas or won’t have the chance to visit and see the play before it ends its run on June 18. Why does Kevin Moriarty’s production of Inherit the Wind matter to you? Kevin is the Artistic Director of the Dallas Theatre Center (DTC), which is about to receive the 2017 Regional Tony Award in New York City this Sunday night. That means people in the theater world consider it the best regional theatre in the country for its “innovative, dynamic programming” and its “significant mark on the Dallas community as well as the American Theater at large.”

Any story about Inherit the Wind would be incomplete without mentioning Margo Jones. Born in a little Texas town in “the Bible Belt,” she studied drama, travelled the world, lived for a time in NY–where she discovered Tennessee Williams and co-directed the premier of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. In 1954, she was the director of a small Dallas theatre in Fair Park, which is home to the Texas State Fair. A friend told her about a play she might be interested in that had been turned down by eight Broadway producers, but said it would take “guts to do it in the bible belt.” She loved the play. So did the conservative audience in Dallas. So did the critics, and the rest is history. Margo is known today for launching the regional theater movement in North America. Sadly, she died at 43, accidentally poisoned by a chemical used to clean the rug in her apartment, only six months after launching Inherit the Wind. Not all good things comes to an end. Margo’s theatre is still in Fair Park but today it bears her name. In 2009, the DTC moved to a larger home, The Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, in the heart of the Dallas Arts District, but still uses the Kalita Humphreys Theater for some of its productions.

Margo Jones, director of 1st production of Inherit the Wind, 1955

And here’s some more good news, brought to us by the play. It turns out that religion and evolution are not mutually exclusive, that they can both thrive and co-exist. During the trial, Henry Drummond puts Matthew Harrison Brady on the stand as an expert on the Bible. (The judge has denied him three expert scientific witnesses.) When asked how old the earth is, Brady says it’s 6,000 years old, like the Bible tells us.

• Drummond asks: if local rocks and fossils are millions of years old, how can this be?
• Drummond then suggests: since the sun wasn’t created until the 4th day, maybe that first day of creation was millions of years long?

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.” Henry Drummond

Whether you’re the kind of person who plucks your apple off the tree of knowledge or you’re someone who questions religious faith, I think we can all agree that every human being is born with a brain–and the right to use it.

from the documentary, City of Joy

This past Sunday The New York Times ran a story about two U.N. human rights investigators killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in March, and the unanswered questions that hover around their murders. Reading the story was a much more visceral–oh no, I get it! experience than it would have been had I not seen the documentary City of Joy at the Dallas International Film Festival. For starters, there’s nothing democratic about the DRC apart from the fact there’s lawlessness and poverty everywhere. Unlike the Democratic Republic of Congo, City of Joy is not a misnomer, but it takes a bit of explaining to get to the JOY part. Stick with me, and you’ll get there.

The DRC is the second largest country in Africa, after Algeria. In the 15th Century, The Kingdom of Kondo in the western Congo was a sophisticated empire with its own aristocracy and a civil service form of government. The country’s problems began in the late 1400s when Portuguese traders discovered a land with many people–strong, disease-resistant natives–who could be turned into slaves by upsetting the current power structure. By the 1600s, the kingdom had disintegrated into anarchy. It’s estimated that 4 million people were forced onto ships at the mouth of the Congo River. That’s only Part 1. In 1876, the Great European “Scramble for Africa” was underway. King Leopold II of Belgium decided he wanted in. Misrepresenting himself as a man with good intentions, he hired explorer Henry Morton Stanley to travel the Congo River Basin and, by 1885, persuaded Western Europe and the U.S. to recognize the Congo as his personal property. He called it the Congo Free State, another misnomer since he looted the country–first of ivory, then of rubber–using atrocious methods. (His private army forced native men into rubber-gatherers by holding their women hostage and cutting off their hands if they didn’t cooperate.) Some humanitarian types in the western world eventually caught on, and the king was forced to turn over his private colony to the Belgian government in 1908. The “Belgian Congo” lasted until 1960. By then, it was abundantly clear that the Congo’s natural resources made it one of the richest places on earth. Its copper was used to make shell casings during WWI. Its uranium was used for the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in WWII. The country was also blessed with diamonds, gold, coal, oil, and countless minerals including one called coltan–today an important component of cell phones.

Part 3–Independence–was predictably disastrous. The Congolese fought for it and drove out the Belgian elite, but there was nobody they could put in place with the skills to govern wisely. Under Belgian rule, the Congolese had been allowed only the most basic of educations.  They didn’t have bragging rights to a single economist, lawyer, engineer or doctor. In short order a military man, Mobutu, took over and ruled the country as a tyrant, milking the country of billions of dollars to finance a “Versailles” life-style. Decades later, in 1997, he was forced out, and so began Part 4, the Great War of Africa. It’s a complicated story, but it began when Rwanda invaded the Congo, furious that Mobutu was sheltering many of the people responsible for the Rwanda genocide three years earlier. From that point on, other African countries jumped into the madness. Ethnic and language differences sparked further violence, but the unabated demand for the Congo’s great natural resources turned it into a powderkeg attached to a lit stick of dynamite. The developed world, including Europe and the U.S., still wanted and needed all those minerals. Rebel groups wanted a piece of the action.

Anarchy, violence, murder, destruction. Somebody’s got to finally say enough, right?

The City of Joy is not the name of an actual city. It’s a small enclave in the eastern Congo inhabited by a changing group of Congolese women. The community has its own hospital–the starting point for every woman and for every good thing that’s happened since it was built.

Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege is a world-renowned gynecologist. He specializes in the treatment of women who have been gang-raped. Given the DRC’s tortured history, it should come as no surprise that rebel forces use rape as a weapon to destroy villages and consolidate power. Congolese women who are raped (but not killed in the process) are shunned by the men in their communities. Without the woman, the family unit breaks down. Children become orphans. Boys become child soliders for rebel groups–willingly or not. In 1999, Dr. Mukwege opened Panzi Hopital and began treating a rape epidemic.

Eve Ensler was visiting the Panzi Hospital in 2007 when she met a patient named Jane. Eve is an American writer, activist and playwright of the Tony-award winning The Vagina Monolgues, and during their chance encounter, Jane told Eve her dream was to build a place where women survivors could live together, heal, transform, and heal. It took a few years, but the City of Joy Leadership Center opened its doors in June 2011. Its founders were Dr. Mukwege, Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler-Deschryver, a women’s rights activist raised in the Congo. Jane Mukunilwa was a member of one of the first graduating classes. Illiterate when she arrived, she was able to read, write and count money within 6 months. Today she’s a key member of the staff.

The film follows the first class of women at the Leadership Center. Today the work continues. Ninety women, 18-30, to a class that lasts six months. Afterwards the determined graduates return to communities in the Congo. As teachers and activists, they are a powerful voice for change. Nothing seems impossible as long as there is hope–and JOY.

The Gospel according to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord, at the Water Tower Theater in Addison, TX

Last week after seeing a new play at the Water Tower Theater in Dallas, I returned home with a great story. Not the greatest story ever told, but something in the runner-up category, a story to delight and surprise, a story to unite sinners and saints in smile.

The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord is a play about “the greatest story ever told,” in that it’s a story about the New Testament–and three rewrites. Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy–all ardent admirers of Jesus of Nazareth–decided they could do a better job writing scripture. That much is true. The fact that they all meet for the first time in purgatory, where they posture, banter and defend their beliefs and reputations, is a product of the playwright’s imagination. I’m not spoiling the fun when I tell you that the illustrious/troubled trio decides to try their hand at writing a consensus gospel, hoping it’s their ticket to move on.

Just to be clear, this is a story about art, not religion–a subject which often seems as divisive  as politics. This story is best enjoyed with an open mind. And sometimes, as I was reminded last week, the story behind a work of art is just as fascinating as the finished piece we’ve gone to see.

Scott Carter is not your typical playwright. His real job keeps him busy and well-fed. A former stand-up comedian turned writer for Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and currently Real Time with Bill Maher, he visited the Water Tower Theatre and talked with the audience one night after the performance. Scott explained that he grew up indifferent to religion (his parents were “social protestants,” looking for the nearest church with nice people whenever they moved to a new neighborhood), but a near-death experience made him inquisitive. This goes back a number of years–almost thirty.

In October 1987, TV journalist Bill Moyers interviews Forrest Church, the senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Scott Carter is watching the show. Four months earlier, he spent a week in a NYC hospital for a near-fatal asthma attack. When he got out, he made a deal with the universe that, for the next couple of years, whenever he ran into someone who wanted to talk about religion–any religion–he’d listen.

Forrest Church wasn’t yet 40, but he’d made quite an impression on his congregation and his city. First hired at age 29, he quickly drew in the crowds–100 people in the beginning to 1,000 for a regular Sunday service. Listening intently, Scott Carter, future playwright, first learns about the Jefferson Bible.

Rewind to 1826.  Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and two-term President, dies at 83. He’s also $100,000 in debt, and his heirs have to sell Monticello. They keep some personal items, among them a book they didn’t know he’d written, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s basically a cut-and-paste job straight out of the King James Bible. Jefferson’s stream-lined gospel focuses on Jesus’s message, but omits the miracles and the resurrection. (He objected to anything “contrary to reason” and thought the writers of the New Testament were unreliable narrators.) Years later the Smithsonian buys the book from a great-granddaughter for $500, and, in 1904, by an order of Congress, copies are made to pass out to incoming members of the house and senate. In 1956, Senator Frank Church of Idaho brings home a copy to show to his young son, Forrest. It changes the boy’s life and sets him on a path to the Harvard Divinity School.

“The goal of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.” Forrest Church

Nine years pass. Scott Carter is now writing for TV and relocates from NYC to L.A. Browsing a neighborhood bookstore, he’s surprised to discover a volume by Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord . Dickens wrote the book for his children, never intending for it to be published, but published it was–64 years after his death. Adapted from the Gospel of Luke, Dickens’s version includes the miracles. At this point, Scott Carter thinks, there’s got to be a play here. He continues his research and reads The Gospel According to Jesus by contemporary scholar Stephen Mitchell, because it’s modeled after what Jefferson did. He’s astonished, on page 52, to read a footnote that tells him Tolstoy did the same thing in The Gospel in Brief. (Tolstoy’s study of Christianity was prompted by a mid-life spiritual crisis. His goal was to find a solution to “the problem of life,” and he finds Jesus’s message by rewriting the four gospels into one. Like Jefferson, he leaves out the miracles.) Now Scott thinks, there’s definitely a play here! and begins to write in earnest, even though the addition of a third “character” means it’s going to take him a whole lot longer.

Finally, in 2005, he’s done and gives it to people to read. Everyone hates it: his wife, his lawyer, his agent, his friends. Three years later he pulls it out and looks at it with fresh eyes. He does some more rewriting, and one of his successful comedy friends likes it! Encouraged, he keeps editing. He stages 35 readings and sits through 15 workshop performances. After completing about 200 drafts, the play premiers at a regional theatre in Los Angeles and Scott and cast get a standing ovation. The play moves to other cities–Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas–and on September 30 it will return to the city where the idea began. Bill Moyers is planning to be in the audience for its Off-Broadway debut. He and Scott Carter have become friends.

Now comes my favorite part of the story. After so many years of working on the play, Scott Carter realized something. What seems at first like a random connection between Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy isn’t really. These three new-age gospel writers, born in different eras in different countries, demonstrate the “inevitable march of humanity toward liberty.” Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, who then wrote the Declaration of Independence, and who was serving as the Ambassador to France at the beginning of the French Revolution–of which he approved. Charles Dickens chronicled the French Revolution in his novel A Tale of Two Cities, which Tolstoy read when he was growing up, trying to figure out what he wanted to be. By the time Tolstoy was famous, he had a picture of Dickens–his favorite Christian novelist–in his study. Before Tolstoy died, one of the last letters he wrote was to Mahatma Gandhi. Tolstoy believed the three most important words in the Bible are “Resist not evil.” Gandhi developed those words into a passive-resistance philosophy by which India was liberated. In turn, Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Gandhi, which led to the Civil Rights movement by which a man was elected President of the United States, who, in Jefferson’s day, would have been a slave.

Jackie Kennedy’s wedding gown made history when she married the young senator from Massachusetts. It became the most photographed wedding dress in America. The year was 1953–eight years before they’d move into the White House–but the press went gaga over the handsome couple (both from American royalty) and Jackie’s stunning gown, which more than suited the “high society” nuptials in Newport, R.I. Now here’s the real surprise. Jackie’s iconic wedding gown was designed by a black woman named Ann Lowe, a society couturier. Last week, on the last day of Black History Month, I tripped over that fact in a Dallas Morning News article about the Smithsonian’s newest museum. Flabbergasted, I set out to learn more.

When Ann Lowe was hired to make Jackie’s wedding gown (and her bridesmaids’ and her mother’s), the Alabama native, age 55, was working in New York City and already well established in her profession. The actress Olivia de Havilland wore one of Ann’s creations in 1947 when she accepted her Oscar for Best Actress, although the name on the dress label said Sonia Rosenberg–Ann’s boss at the time. Like the math wiz Katherine Johnson in the film Hidden Figures, only a tiny segment of the population knew about Ann Lowe’s talent. She dressed the society set, women with last names like Rockefeller, du Pont and Roosevelt. Marjorie Merriweather Post, one of the richest women in the world and the original owner of Mar-a-Lago (President Trump’s weekend White House), was another enthusiastic customer. Yet Ann died almost broke and in relative obscurity at age 82.

Ann was born in 1898 in the deep South, so it’s a given that she endured prejudice. While that’s part of her story, the more extraordinary part is her drive and determination, her talent, and the obstacles she overcame. She was the great-granddaughter of a slave and a white plantation owner. After the Civil War, her grandmother and mother started a dress designing business, but her mother died suddenly when Ann was 16, and Ann took over. The First Lady of Alabama–the governor’s wife–had placed an order for four dresses, and Ann delivered. A few years later, she was a respected designer in Florida, having been enticed by the wife of a Tampa business tycoon to move there and make custom dresses for her and her daughters. Ann jumped on a train with her baby son, but left her new husband behind. “It was a chance to make all the lovely gowns I’d always dreamed of,” she told The Saturday Evening Post in 1964. She’d later marry again and divorce–both husbands disapproved of her ambition.

Design school in New York City was another dream of Ann’s, and she made it happen with the blessing of her Tampa benefactor. She was only nineteen. When she got there, however, she was assigned to a separate classroom because the white students didn’t want to sit with her. She graduated early and returned to a successful business in Tampa, where she dressed the city’s wealthiest women. Ten years later she took her savings and moved to New York for good. She worked as an in-house dress designer for Saks Fifth Avenue and specialty shops like Hattie Carnegie. Word of her talent quickly spread. Famous designers like Christian Dior were equally impressed with her design skills. Ann opened her own shop, but disaster struck.

Ten days before the Kennedy wedding, a water pipe burst and destroyed 10 gowns–Jackie’s and the bridesmaids. It had taken two months to make Jackie’s gown, but Ann regrouped, re-ordered the fabrics and worked around the clock with her small staff. She delivered the dresses on-time and in person to Hammersmith Farm in Rhode Island. On her arrival, the security staff directed her to the back entrance, but she refused and made it through the front door. At the time of the wedding, the only press mention of Ann’s role was by the fashion editor of The Washington Post, who wrote, “The dress was designed by a Negro, Ann Lowe.” She didn’t even profit from the job–due to the burst pipe, she incurred a loss of over two thousand dollars. A decade later Ann owed her suppliers $10,000. Her friends in the business helped cover her debts, but the IRS shut her down for non-payment of back taxes totaling $12,800. An anonymous donor paid her tax bill. Ann later said, in interviews with The Saturday Evening Post and Ebony magazine, that she believed it was Jackie, with whom she had remained close.

“I wanted to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer,” she said in 1965, during an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. Towards that end, she set out to work for the best families. “I’ve been as careful about the people I work for as any social climber,” she told The Saturday Evening Post the year before. “I don’t do many dresses, so I have to be selective.”

Throughout her New York career, Ann lived in a modest Harlem apartment and focused on her work. All the dresses she made were one-of-a-kind. She earned a “Couturier of the Year” plaque in 1961. “I feel so happy when I am making clothes,” she said in an Oakland Tribune interview in 1966. “I could just jump and down with joy.” Managing her business finances was never her strong suit. She relied on her son Arthur for that, but he died in 1958 in a car accident. As her business began to hemorrhage money, she lost one eye to glaucoma and almost lost the other one, too. “I’ve had to work by feel,” she said in 1964 to the Saturday Evening Post. “But people tell me I’ve done better feeling than others do seeing.” In 1968, she opened her final shop, Ann Lowe Originals on a tony patch of Madison Avenue, but it closed before too long and Ann retired with very little money.

Jackie’s wedding gown is part of the permanent collection of the JFK Presidential Library & Museum in Boston, but it hasn’t been displayed since 2003. The weight of the fabric makes it at risk of tearing. The Marshall Fields Department Store in Chicago commissioned a paper replica of the dress to donate to the museum, where it was displayed in 2013–the 60th anniversary of the wedding. The museum has said that exhibits of Jackie’s dress always draw the largest crowds. When Ann died in 1981, The New York Times ran an obituary on her. “Seventeen years ago, at the height of her career, she was said to be almost penniless.” And yet, the newspaper noted, five of her designs were in the costume institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now Ann is getting some long overdue, big-time exposure. The National Museum of African American History & Culture opened last fall and includes a special exhibit on Ann Lowe. She’s no longer “society’s best kept secret,” the words used to describe Ann during the height of her career. There’s even a children’s picture book, Fancy Party Gowns by award-winning journalist Deborah Blumenthal, that was published in January.

If you watched the Academy Awards ceremony last month, you saw the real Katherine Johnson honored on stage for her work with the NASA space program. She’s 98 now, but still looks pretty great–and happy. I’m sure Ann would be pretty happy that her spot in the new museum proves she was “a major dress designer.”  Her life story and her work should inspire young talent of all races for years to come. Too bad Ann isn’t alive to see it.

In 2012, Time Magazine named 39-year-old Asghar Farhadi one of the most 100 influential people in the world. This was the same year he won a well-deserved Oscar and a Golden Globe for his film A Separation. His most recent film The Salesman (which takes its title from Death of a Salesman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arthur Miller play) is again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s another domestic drama–set in Tehran, Iran.

Subtitles again. But to pass on a film like The Salesman is to deprive yourself of a masterful piece of storytelling. Like Spain’s Pedro Almodovar (Julieta), Farhadi is a director who also writes his own screenplays.

The Salesman isn’t about a Willy Loman-type character–at least not at the outset. Rana and Emad, a happily married young couple, are getting ready to star in a local production of the Arthur Miller play when they are forced to abandon their apartment and find another. In the opening moments of the film, the building in which they’re living starts to shake and crack apart, forcing everyone to evacuate. An earthquake? No. The demolition of the building next door seems to be the cause, but we learn this almost as an aside–it’s no biggie, just another example of daily life in Tehran. Fortunately (a sentiment that will haunt the couple and anyone who sees the film) a theatre colleague knows of a vacant apartment in his building, and they move right in. But one night, Emad is delayed at the theatre (asked to talk to the government censors who might shut down the production), and Rana is assaulted by an unknown man while taking a shower. She ends up in the hospital with a nasty head wound. It heals but begins to infect her relationship with her husband. She’s afraid to be alone, especially in the apartment. He fails to understand everything she’s going through. There’s half-hearted talk about calling the police (which speaks volumes about the view of law enforcement) but Rana, in particular, is worried about the inevitable damage to her reputation.

The questions begin to mount. Apart from the head wound, what exactly happened to her? Did the attacker mean to assault Rana, or was he after the former tenant, a “loose” woman who left many belongings behind in her haste to move out? Emad becomes obsessed with tracking down the attacker and getting his own form of justice.

If you or someone close to you has ever suffered through a cataclysmic event that struck out of nowhere (and who among us has not?), you’ll appreciate the power of this story. Farhadi isn’t the type of filmmaker who points accusatory fingers at his characters. Instead he lets the viewer wonder: what would I do if it were me?

When he won an Oscar for A Separation, it was a first for an Iranian film made in Iran. But a planned celebration at home to honor him for the win was cancelled by the Iranian government. At the time, Iran’s President was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claimed the Holocaust was a myth (today he might call it ‘fake news’), and Farhadi has described the eight years of that presidency as “the most bitter period of life that I remember.”

Last month he told RogerEbert.com, “There are some very radical critics from the government who hate my films, in part because they believe my work represents a negative view of Iran for western audiences.” A Separation almost didn’t get made, in part because the government objected to Farhadi’s history of supporting several filmmakers who’d been exiled. In the end, he made it without any government money. In other words, he walks a fine line doing what he does. The people of Iran are richer for it, and so are the rest of us who go to see his films. It’s doubtful we’ll be seeing him at the Academy Awards this year. He’d planned to attend, then changed his mind after President Trump’s executive order visa ban was announced–even if an exception could have been made for him.

If you’re looking for truth and a realistic look at a country that’s much in the news these days, this film–a work of fiction–might be a good way to go.

Director Pedro Almodovar

If you haven’t seen Julieta and you love riveting and nuanced human dramas, get thee to the nearest movie theatre. Julieta is a Spanish-language film with subtitles, but it’s North American in origin–based on three linked short stories by Nobel Prize winning fiction writer Alice Munro, an English-speaking Canadian. Munro’s Juliet is a young Ph.D candidate whose life is forever altered by two chance encounters on a train. With finesse, film director Almodovar transforms her into Julieta.

Having read the three Munro stories several times, I can say that the film doesn’t suffer from the change in setting. If anything, the film is richer than it might have been had it been set in Munro’s native Canada. The Mediterranean colors are bold and dazzling. The love affair at the story’s center is sexier and more passionate. Middle-aged Julieta’s heartache over her lost child (missing, but not dead) seems even more devastating.

Apart from a love of storytelling, Alice Munro and Pedro Almodovar would seem to have little in common. Born almost a generation apart (she’s 85; he’s 67), they’ve both lived their lives in the countries where they were born. She’s reserved and straight (with a husband); he’s flamboyant and gay (and has a partner who doesn’t live with him). She’s college-educated; he couldn’t afford film school (although he does hold honorary doctorates from Harvard and Oxford University). She spent her post-college youth in the Vancouver suburbs, isolated from culture and weighted down by young children and a traditional husband; he moved to Madrid at 17 while Franco, the dictator, was still in power but experienced the liberating sense of freedom many young people felt when Franco died a few years later. Munro and Almodovar have never met. They never collaborated on the film, and yet the result is a two-hour work of art, a compelling story about love, work, fear, regret, loss and hope. People are people, whether they live in Canada or Spain or pick-your-country.

Art Without Borders. How’s that for a catchphrase? Art matters here, there and everywhere. Art matters. Art matters. Art matters…………….

“You know this is a movie with subtitles, right?” asked the young man who sold me my ticket. Another couple had yelled at him the night before, after leaving the movie. You didn’t tell us it had subtitles! I’m assuming the couple could read but hadn’t bothered to read the ads/promotional materials about the film. How sad. The yelling, in particular. And blaming another person for one’s own laziness. Would they have complained if Meryl Streep were the star?

That’s another remarkable thing about this film. Who fires Meryl Streep? When Pedro bought the film rights to the stories back in 2009, he decided Juliet would be his first English-language film. He would call it Silence, the title of Munro’s third story (the first two are Chance and Soon). He would set it in New York City and on the New England coast (the sea is critical to the plot) and he lined up Meryl Streep to star as the middle-aged Juliet. As time passed, he worried that he didn’t understand North American culture well enough to make the film he wanted. He and Meryl amicably agreed to put off working together until a future time. Then Martin Scorsese beat him to the title Silence, and Pedro’s Spanish film became Julieta.

Pedro Almodovar is arguably Spain’s most famous living director, and Julieta is his 20th feature film. He has two Oscars, two Golden Globes and many top Europe-based awards. It is said that no two of his films are alike. If you haven’t seen any, these titles speak volumes: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!; Dark Habits; Bad Education. He’s also made films like All About My Mother; Talk to Me; Volver. His earliest films were campy and raunchy and irreverent and featured characters who were gay or transsexuals or transvestites. Julieta, in comparison, is tame–but it’s also tender and powerful.

Alice Munro is arguably the greatest living short story writer writing in English. Here’s something she once said:

“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves stories–and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.”

That’s exactly what Almodovar has done with Munro’s Juliet stories. He’s changed a few details and plot points to better reflect Spanish culture and family dynamics, but he hasn’t changed the essence of the story–a story that can speak to us all. That seems like a great reason to watch this foreign film and others, too–even if you don’t care for subtitles.

Alice Munro

Awards Season is upon us, and I was thrilled to see Viola Davis win a Golden Globe last Sunday night for her gorgeous, heart-breaking performance as the wife of a charismatic man who loves deeply but poisons all his relationships by his inability to come to terms with his past. The husband in question is a black man living in pre-Civil Rights America, but the character traits of the man I described could easily belong to anyone: white, black, Latino, Asian or even Extra-Terrestrial. Fences, August Wilson’s play-turned-film, gives me another reason to plead my case: Art Matters. It’s much more than entertainment.

“In Fences, they [white people] see a garbage man, a person they don’t really look at, although they see a garbage man every day. By looking at Troy’s life, white people find out that the content of this black garbage man’s life is affected by the same things–love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that. . .can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives.” August Wilson, interviewed by The Paris Review, 1999.

And what do black people see? The Paris Review asked him that, too:

“Blacks see the content of their lives being elevated into art. They don’t always know that it is possible, and it’s important for them to know that.”

Fences made its Broadway debut in 1987 and won the Tony and also a Pulitzer. When Denzel Washington and Viola Davis starred in a Broadway revival in 2010, they both won Tonys, as did the play for Best Revival. But Fences is only one-tenth of Wilson’s crowning achievement. Ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th Century, each chronicling a different aspect of the African-American experience. Collectively they’re known as The Pittsburgh Cycle.

There are many cool aspects to this story. Wilson didn’t write the plays in chronological order. After some small regional success as a playwright, he submitted two of his plays to Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwright’s Conference. Both were rejected. He wrote a new one, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and submitted it. This third one was the charm and brought him national recognition. Ma Rainey was based on the rough-and-tumble life of a real-life blues singer, set in 1927 Chicago. After its success, Wilson realized that each of those three plays he’d submitted to the Conference were set in a different decade. Maybe he should keep going? He did, and the rest is history. He is considered one of the pre-eminent playwrights of the 2nd half of the 20th Century, mentioned in the same sentence with Edward Albee, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Fourteen days after his death, in 2005, The Virginia Theatre on Broadway was renamed The August Wilson Theatre.

August Wilson died much too young–at 60–from liver cancer. He’d optioned Fences as a feature film to Paramount back in 1987 but specified that he wanted it to have a black director. All these years later, the film finally found its match in Denzel Washington. If you’ve seen the film or the play, you know it’s called Fences for a reason. Sometimes people build fences to keep their loved one’s close (like Viola Davis’s character). And sometimes people build fences to keep others away. Wilson put up his own fence when he optioned the film rights, and here’s what he said about wanting a black director for the film.

Culture, not race, was the issue for him–even though the two, of course, are linked. Whether or not you agree with him (and there are probably those who disagree), I thought of this analogy. It might be like asking a Chinese director (and former peasant) to direct a Jane Austen novel-turned-film.

Staring at death in 2005, Wilson was especially disappointed about two things (according to what his widow’s told the press). That one of his plays had never been made into a film. (Now, of course, Fences has.) And that Jitney, one of the first plays he wrote in the Pittsburgh Cycle, was the only one that had not made it to Broadway. That’s about to change on January 19. At least his widow and their daughter can savor the moment. Set in 1971, Jitney is about a group of Pittsburgh cab drivers facing strained family relationships, romantic troubles, violence and economic woes in their gentrifying neighborhood. Not long after he wrote it, that great TV series Taxi starring Danny DeVito became a big hit. Different racial/ethnic component, but there are many similarities.

Here’s something else August Wilson could be excited about–and it’s a biggie. In December, Denzel Washington announced that he will executive-produce Wilson’s other nine plays as films for HBO. “It’s my ten years’ life work right now,” he said. “One of the finest things that’s happened to me in my career.” The first play he’ll produce is Ma Rainey, which jump-started Wilson’s career as a playwright. It’s the only one of the 10 that’s not set in Pittsburgh. As powerful as live theatre can be, it can’t reach the number of people that a film does.

In his too-short lifetime, August Wilson travelled far: Dirt poor childhood/mother descended from slaves/absent German-immigrant father/high school education/self-taught poet & playwright TO icon of the American theatre. He wrote plays about African-Americans, but he wrote characters that speak to us all.

If you’ve seen Arrival, the beautiful and thought-provoking film starring Amy Adams as a linguistics professor asked to communicate with the aliens who’ve docked 12 spaceships around the globe, you may have noticed it was based on a short story by Ted Chiang. Who? That’s right, Ted Chiang is the superstar nobody ever heard of–until now.

Apparently I’m not the only avid reader/writer who’d never heard of him before. Even though Chiang has won all the major Science Fiction Writer awards over the past 25 years, he’s not prolific. He only writes short fiction, not novels–fifteen short stories since 1990 and some have been published in on-line magazines. Most sci-fi lovers–even most Star Wars fanatics–don’t read short stories. Ditto that for most readers, whatever the genre. Now, however, because of the critically acclaimed movie with a big-name cast, Ted Chiang has a lot to “tweet” about. Except he doesn’t Twitter, which further explains his anonymity.

Arrival opened in mid-November. As of December 21, worldwide box office receipts totaled more than $142 million: the film has already recouped the $47 million it cost to make. I do read short stories, but not sci-fi, and yet I stumbled across Ted Chiang’s most recent story, The Great Silence, in the anthology The Best American Short Stories 2016. Chiang’s story is told from the point-of-view of a parrot. It’s only four pages long. My reaction? Profound. Come to find out, the same story also appeared in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. Any writer would cut off her arm (okay, maybe a finger) to duplicate that kind of success. And yet, in this day and age, is Chiang a SUPERSTAR? American fiction writers like Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, John Grisham and Danielle Steele are superstars. Ted Chiang has floated below the internet/social media radar for decades, but his words–his earth-shaking, soul-rattling ideas–might light up our movie screens for years to come.

Chiang’s 1998 Story of Your Life (only his 2nd published one) was turned into the screenplay Arrival by somebody else. Chiang doesn’t write screenplays (he can’t even imagine it!) but another story he wrote, Understand, is being turned into a film by 20th Century Fox. Two other stories are under option and two more are ‘in conversation’ with the people who make movies. Including Arrival, that’s a possible six movies based on short stories he wrote. And remember, he’s only written fifteen so far.

So who is this Ted Chiang? How did he get to now? What are the science-driven ideas he writes about?

It’s almost Christmas. Whatever your faith, it’s holiday season and you’re busy. Go enjoy. More later.

Happy Holidays, and thanks so much for letting me muse to you about the importance of Art. If we pay attention, it just might save the world.