As most of you must know by now, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer marks quite a few firsts. It’s the first time Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling has cast himself in a title role, the first time he has both directed and acted in a Guthrie play, and the first time he has dusted off his acting chops in more than twenty years. 

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You know things are going badly when working at a whorehouse represents a step up in your living situation.  But it beats being gang-raped by soldiers for five months, or having your uterus split open with a bayonet, which is the fate suffered by Salima and Sophie (respectively), two young Congalese women caught in the crossfire of a civil war that is tearing their country apart. 

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It’s not an opinion that I’m very vocal about. Like love of our flag or love of our Lord, puppy love is something that’s simply unquestioned in this country. Recently, on the Jay Leno Show, Chris Rock delineated our newest piety when he joked about the modest level of outrage directed at Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old girl. Rock’s remarks provoked an electronic whiteout of moralizing invective—not for his joke comparing Roman Polanski to O.J. Simpson, but for his joke refusing to compare Polanski to Michael Vick. “Michael Vick must be wondering, ‘What the hell did I do?’" Rock said.

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The death of the book has long been foretold. Sages of the digital future speak rapturously of a time when all the world’s knowledge will be contained on a silicon wafer no larger than a baby’s tooth, and all forms of written content—books, magazines, newspapers, press releases, recipes, doctor’s prescriptions, shopping lists, notes from your mother—will be viewed on a screen lit by diodes capable of producing 186 million different colors and several thousand shades of gray, none of which will in any way disturb your mental equilibrium or challenge any of the moral, philosophical, religious, political, or intellectual conclusions arrived at by your information-saturated brain beyond the age of, say, fifteen. This bookless existence will be a blessed era, they say, unless of course you want to read outside, in which case you’re f-----d.

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You have to hand it to the Coen brothers: they never make the same movie twice. Their latest, A Serious Man, is an odd addition to the Coen catalogue. It’s a quirky, low-budget film steeped in Jewish culture and set in the bleakest imaginable outpost of 1960s suburbia, and it is essentially a philosophical meditation on the meaning of life, or lack thereof. Market that, suckers.

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August Wilson died six months after writing Radio Golf, the final installment of his 10-play Century Cycle, a lifelong project that features a play set in each decade of the 20th Century. It would be fitting and just to say that Wilson left the best for last, but he didn’t—Radio Golf doesn’t even rank in the top five plays of Wilson’s cycle. But what it lacks in emotional, spiritual, and dramatic depth, it makes up for in a kind of eerie relevance. And Penumbra Theatre, under the direction of Lou Bellamy, is breathing life into the play in a way no other company in the country can.  

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