Reviews for House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays

The average rating for House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-12 00:00:00 Matthew Huffaker PROPHETIC (sic) ABOUT TRUMPIAN DYSTOPIA ANNA DEAVERE SMITH - HOUSE ARREST - 2003 Two centuries of American history in two acts. Practically all the dramatic text uttered by actors is quotations of documents, interviews, articles authored by real people in history, starting with the Presidents presented in the play and then many other people, journalists, historians, politicians, etc., who said or wrote something on the concerned presidents or topics. The trajectory is from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, hence from Jefferson to Jefferson and from the mystery of Jefferson's black slave mistress to the publicly discussed, impeached, and tried in the Senate Bill Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, the White House intern who became very famous because of this affair which was not an affair, just an evanescent horny episode perfectly exploited by Lewinsky for money and the Republican Party for political advantage, the next president who was to be the son of the previous president defeated by Bill Clinton himself. That's what revenge is all about. Between these two alpha and omega presidents, we have two other names of some importance. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, in the order used in the play, anti-chronological, anticlockwise in a way, going back in time. F.D. Roosevelt brings in the type of relationship that exists between a president and the people in his time. Roosevelt opened up the White House to reporters and he, himself, used the radio with his famous column there, the celebrated Fireside Chats. It was also a time when the relationship with journalists was relaxed and intense, direct, and just cordial, even when critical. Along this line, the author hints at George H. Bush who invited journalists to play bowl at the bowling alley in the White House, and this direct relationship enabled the President to get the benefit of the doubt. And as for that Clinton never had it because he always kept the press and journalists within a rather formal and friendlily distant position, because FDR revealed, and after him all those who used television, that the President had/has become an actor, a plaything in a way, in the hands of the journalists that are going to manipulate him though if the President knows how to play the game he is the real manipulator, but of public opinion through the vain journalists who believe they are manipulating him. That's where Lincoln comes into the picture. Lincoln loved the theater and that cost him his life. He was assassinated by a certain Booth within a theater in Washington DC during a play. This assassination is brought up with a piece of writing of Lincoln himself about the dream he had some time before his real assassination. In this dream, he had a premonition of his own assassination and he apparently was bothered by it but did not take extra precautions in his public appearances. That was fatal to him. FDR was thus the first president to use a modern medium to reach the people directly over the heads, pens, and voices of official journalists. The next innovator in this field will be Kennedy who will use television as his launching stage. He had understood how it worked: the audience must like you totally from the very start, by your tone, look, body language, etc. Kennedy appeared friendly and close. Nixon appeared austere and dry. We know the result: elected for sure but without the popular vote which raises questions. He would have been defeated in any other country that elects their presidents. But Kennedy is essentially used as one of the three assassinations the author considers were necessary for Nixon to finally be elected in 1968. Three assassinations: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, it took a few more, and first of all Malcolm X. But also, the riots or violent scuffles of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968 and behind it, the full civil rights movement spearheaded by black militants of all affiliations and political colors. The rainbow was within the black movement at the time. Angela Davis soon later will speak of the need for a rainbow coalition. That was coming up with the hippie movement, with films, music, and all sorts of peace and love works of fiction that will bring just one year later Woodstock and after that a tremendous production from Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair to Fritz the Cat and Zabriskie Point. Nixon was elected as a reaction against the Vietnam war based among many voters on the desire to finish it fast, with the racist alternative of George Wallace, and in the wings, the nuclear or atomic alternative of Barry Goldwater was defeated in 1964. In 1969, I remember in North Carolina, after the invasion of Cambodia some of my colleagues at Dunn High School advocating the use of an atom bomb on Hanoi or Haiphong. Nixon was law and order inside, winning the war with its extension in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, and the guarantee - or promise - that nuclear weapons will not be used. Not "peace and love" but "peace and quiet." But this Nixon period reduced to that simple element of what is identified as the clowning touch of the presidential function leads us to what came next because the press had moved from credulousness (the president's words were sacred), to skepticism (always take what the president says with a grain of salt, or maybe two), and to cynicism (the president only tells lies and in fact, they all tell lies. The Polygraph has become the machine of the century under Clinton, and sometime before. And that leads the public to believe that they all lie anyway, and the winners are those who manage to hide their lies from the polygraph, the lie-detecting machine. There is no presumption of innocence, as the author says with Bill Clinton in an interview. It is no longer justice for all. It is no longer Habeas Corpus. It has become: "you are guilty if you cannot prove the accusation against you is false if you cannot disprove the accusation against you. The accuser does not have to prove his point. You have to disprove his point. And Clinton won with "It depends on what the meaning of is is." And that brought at the end of the 20th century what is called "moral slippage." What guides people, and politicians first, is not ethics or morality, the pursuit of good and responsible obligations, but a world upside down. "From robots imitating humans," we have moved to the reverse "humans imitating robots." We have totally lost all sense of humor, even black, particularly black, and we do not know what tolerance is anymore: all those who disagree with you are fake-news-mongers, enemies of the people, hoax-disseminators. The world is nothing but a big basket in which hundreds of spiders are locked up and each spider is one plotting theory. History is nothing but plotting all around, plots after plots. Clinton developed the Information Highways and out life has become dominated, governed, possessed by Information and Communication Technology and the author is so right when she concludes: "We're more and more into communicationS and less and less into communicationØ." The former is a technology that gives the machine authority and power with Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. The latter is the in-person direct exchange of facts, data, and ideas between two or just a few people in one place at one time. Is a videoconference on Skype communicationØ or communicationS? Marshall McLuhan has written several volumes on the subject and you can be sure that Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Information & communicationS Technology are not the extension of our mind, but the extension of the mind of a narrow elite to control and dominate, in one word to manipulate the masses. But that is no opium, you know. You can step out of it in one minute and a half, 90 seconds, 6 times 15 seconds, etc. Maybe one day our school system will bring information-&-communications-literacy to children as soon as they can use a smartphone. But we will have to learn how to be smarter than our smartphones. This play is thus a play about the progressive emergence of the maximum technological alienation of people, meaning their being alienated by the technology they use more and more, and that surrounds them all the time. Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU ANNA DEAVERE SMITH - PIANO - 2004 This play is dealing with history, but this time in Cuba in 1898, and the play assumes the President of the USA is Theodore Roosevelt, aka Teddy Roosevelt, at the time, though he will only be president, the 26th President, from 1901 to 1909, supposedly the youngest President of the United States. The play is covering the very period when Cuba got rid of the Spanish colonial power under which it was lingering. Cuba will be successful as for getting rid of the Spaniards, but they did not get rid of the US who replaced the Spaniards in no time with battle ships in Havana and troops to protect American property, meaning the property of Americans, there. In fact, the end is very ambiguous, but you'll have to discover it yourselves. Three parties are face to face in a triadic conflict. First the Cubans with some rebels in some kind of insurrection against Spain, and some others who are the owners of the plantations and other economic activities but define themselves as Cubans. They don't take part in the insurrection, but they try to be carried by the insurrectional wave, apparently not with much success. The second party is Spain herself that sent troops to fight against the insurrection who apparently cannot be victorious. So unofficial actions, negotiations, and simple calculations are developed to more or less push the USA into the war against Spain since the ambition of the US, asserted as being Theodore Roosevelt's own, is to kick Spain out of America, a vast widening of the Monroe Doctrine from Northern America, though without Canada, to the whole Americas, though still without Canada and France and England in Guyana and the West Indies. There was even an attempt to kick the Spaniards out of the Philippines in those strange times of the emergence of American imperialism, particularly after the Civil War and when Reconstruction was replaced by segregation, supposedly equal and definitely separate, hence and thus, thereto and therefrom, de facto unequal. The third party is the Americans themselves, represented here by a certain Theodora, aka Teddy (an obvious allusion to the 26th President of the US), an American businesswoman, like many of her business colleagues, who only want to buy the plantations, the land, and the USA will send troops to protect American interests. Cuba had to wait for Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to finally erase this imperialistic dependence, and good for them, when we see what it costs Porto Rico to have remained in such an imperialistic dependence. These Americans are just called the baron-thieves. The play makes the Cuban planters in the play - the plantation was initially the family property of Alicia, married to Eduardo - be related to the Spanish general sent to Cuba to crush the rebellion, Antonio Lopez y Vargas, who is the brother of Eduardo, the husband of the Plantation owner and the father of Carlito, an important stake and character in the play, though he will not have the final word he deserves. The play considers several fundamental problems in the West Indies and in South America or Mesoamerica. First of all the slaves in the past, going back to the grandfather and even the father of Alicia, not such a distant past, slaves everywhere in the fields and in the house, and this slavery is clearly justified for Antonio because Africans are not quite human since they are for him related to apes. He couldn't be truer, but all humans are descending from apes, not only colored ones. This racism is constant in Antonio but not so much absent in other characters. At the end, a black enlisted US soldiers takes an ex-slave or descendant of slaves, Susannah, into custody because connected to the insurrection, I guess, because it is not clear. A black man arresting a black woman in 1898 is quite surprising because African Americans had been integrated into the margin of US armed forces during the Civil War, but only into the margin, and often, as said in the play, under the authority of white officers. The second issue presented in the play is anti-colonial insurrections. Are the "rebels" or "revolutionaries" supposed to get into an alliance with Americans, or are they supposed to get money for some kind of a deal, and then use that money to start businesses? Once again, not clear. Susanna is negotiating bringing Carlito back after he has been "kidnapped" with his full consent by the insurrection, represented here by Chan and his wife Han, both servants on the plantation, negotiating with Carlito's mother, Alicia. She is also negotiating a lot of money from Antonio to manage the packing of Alicia's belongings in order to leave and go back to Spain. Carlito will never be delivered before departure, and Antonio will tell Alicia a tall tale about his fate in the hands of American soldiers, and Alicia will become at least deranged, probably corrugated, and definitely insane. She will be "taken" back to Europe by Eduardo who will put her in some asylum in Austria with doctors to take care of her. The best part is that Carlito was not killed by anyone. He was with the insurrection and is willing to remain with them to fight for some free Cuba, but he is more or less fooled into exchanging his plantation for his freedom by Teddy, but since Teddy has to flee in front of the Rebels who burn all that is in the hands of Americans, she loses the plantation and declares Carlito "her property" and takes him along with herself back to the USA. It was not easy for the son of an elite family in Cuba at the time to become a revolutionary fighting for the independence of the country and for freedom for the people. The title is referring to Alicia's piano - and by extension to Carlito's cello - that are a continuous element in the play with music played regularly, with a music teacher, Martine, who is a man because this name is masculine in Spanish, and some discussions with Antonio reveal him to be such a Spanish-oriented bigot that he refuses to eat any other food but Spanish food, to listen to any other music but Spanish music. He is engaged in a war against any contact with anything that is not Spanish. That national bigotry is a trend in American thinking and culture that has always been present and has been dominant now and then, certainly not a typical Spanish trait. Of course Antonio is a rapist as for his relationships with women, and he rapes Han, the cook of the plantation, the wife of Chan and he considers that normal since they are servants: they have to justify their privileged position [...] Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-10 00:00:00 Ryan Taylor Smith is a marvel. "House Arrest" is, like her two best known works, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, an artfully crafted drama by interview and primary source (since it includes tales of the White House from Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR's times, as well as the first George Bush and Bill Clinton). There is less dramatic coherence in House Arrest, perhaps because it doesn't hinge around a single event, as Fires and Twilight each do. Instead it looks at memory and history and changing perceptions of news and privacy, with race and inequality as filters of perspective. Studs Terkel begins and ends the play, commenting on an awkward public moment rescued by a baby's laugh: "Thank God for a human reaction! We haven't lost yet!" Piano is a conventionally written play, a historical drama set in Cuba on the eve of the rebellion that got subsumed in the Spanish American War. For a while it is very interesting than it just fizzles into clichés and cartoon characters'a bombastic, bullying Spanish general, a pre-flapper turned political operator. Smith is a master of the interview and organizing people's words into telling narrative structures but doesn't seem to have the same caliber ear when, instead of putting other people's words into her mouth, she is putting her words into other people's mouths. House Arrest gets a 4; Piano a 2 or less.