It’s pretty clear in the play “An Immaculate Misconception” that neither one has all the answers. As for which is more complicated, it’s a toss-up.
Science and the human psyche provide tension in Gillian Eaton’s production of this play by Carl Djerassi, the renowned scientist credited with inventing the birth control pill.
Djerassi has turned to writing in his later years and has had several plays produced. This one deals with a subject he knows intimately, reproduction, and if his dialogue doesn’t always buzz with human electricity, Djerassi generally manages to keep things humming.
For instance, the question “Where did you get my sperm?” has probably never been spoken in a play before.
The audience already knows how, and why, researcher Melanie Laidlaw (Roxanne Wellington) has acquired the sperm of her lover, Vitaly (Thomas Hoagland). Melanie has developed a revolutionary method for fighting infertility; it works in hamsters but she needs a human guinea pig.
As it happens, Melanie is 37 and wants a child, but Vitaly is a) married, b) a resident of Russia and c) infertile under normal conditions.
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The foreign correspondent and fiction writer Philip Caputo's new novel about aid workers in Africa, "Acts of Faith," lands in bookstores with all the high-minded weightiness of an airdrop. The book's settings are almost untouched in recent English-language fiction: the war-torn, famine-racked Sudan of the 1990s and the semipermanent encampments of relief workers clustered in neighboring countries. And Caputo's theme is an important one: how do-gooders intoxicated by their own mercy can wind up doing anything but. So why does "Acts of Faith" still leave a taste like 900 pounds of U.N.- delivered millet -- well-intentioned, good for you and
There is so much respect being paid to the literary tradition of Jane Austen's classic novel, "Pride and Prejudice," it keeps the audience at a distance in Arizona Theatre Company's adaptation by Jon Jory. Much of this 2 1/2-hour production consists of various cast members talking directly to the audience, connecting scenes from the play with narration that summarizes big chunks of the novel.
Curiously, the actor who makes the strongest impression has the least to say. He is tall and stately Anthony Marble as the reticent Mr. Darcy. With his striking profile straight from an ancient Greek coin, Marble can
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"It's an interaction between two cultures, two worlds and hopefully they both all the characters learn something from each other," Shaffer said during an interview. Shaffer, whose previous award-winning solo performance play "Let My Enemy Live Long!"was called "a tour de force of observation and evocation"
David Mamet’s latest play is another courtroom drama – except that it’s like no other. This is the most surreal trial since the one in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and you follow it with bizarrely opposing reactions. On the one hand, you can just laugh – often uproariously – at the escalating madness here. The judge first distracted by his hay fever and then demented by his hay fever tablets; the Jewish defendant at loggerheads with his Christian attorney; the prosecutor beset by his hysterical boyfriend. Mamet pillories every kind of political correctness. And what the hell is
In the middle of the commotion in Parliament over the past two weeks Sonia Gandhi may have noted, probably with a bit of concern, the diminishing of two of her more important chief ministers. Vilasrao Deshmukh, mostly has himself to blame for his humiliation. What else can you say for the chief minister of India’s second largest, and second richest, state if he has to present himself in Delhi to explain to his party president his policy over an issue of such urgent national importance as a ban on Mumbai’s dance bars. This, when his state is facing its starkest