Stage
Weales, Gerald
STAGE PULLING STRINGS 'RADIANT CITY' & 'CIVILIZATION' heodora Skipitares's The Radiant City at the American Place Theatre, the story of the building of a not-so-radiant city, begins in the ice...
...Macmillan, 1990...
...Gallaudet University Press, 1989...
...13.95 No one understands Michael until the little misfit proves his worth by building a rocket ship...
...Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990...
...Houghton Mifflin, 1989...
...A barely animated scene out of Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives shows the brutality of tenement living, but with the telescoping of time characteristic of the piece we move abruptly to Le Corbusier and the promise of the radiant city...
...What you have in The Radiant City is a collection of comments on the man and the city which become opportunities for Skipitares's inventive designs...
...Little Brown, 1991...
...10 and up) Dawn Rider, by Jan Hudson, Philomel Books, 1990...
...HarperCollins, 1990...
...12 and up) Books for Children and Young Adults T he following titles have been selected from among the many published during 1988-1991 to cover a wide range of ages, interests, and readability...
...6.95 A how-to book for teen-agers who want to help those less forhmate...
...But there is more to him than his swagger...
...12 and up) Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli...
...Little Brown~Sierra Club, 1990...
...His career goes up like a skyrocket...
...Illustrated by Jerry Pinkey...
...Hlustrated by Tony Ross...
...Atheneum, 1990...
...Little Brown, 1990...
...There is no doubt about Skipitares's satiric intentions here, but why, after all these years, go after Robert Moses...
...Beautifully illustrated in pastels...
...Putnam, 1991...
...Macmillan, 1990...
...14.95 Rebellious Cammy resents her perfect cousin Patty Ann until a tragedy puts things into perspective...
...Illustrated by Anne Sibley O'Brien...
...and get more information...
...GERALD WEALES SCREEN TWO TOO CUTE 'FISHER KING' & 'FRANKIE & JOHNNY' hen they weren't doing Shakespeare, great nineteenth-century actors like James Tyrone and Henry Irving performed such potboilers as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Bells, not only for profit but as easy outlets for their spellbinding talents...
...5 to 8) People of the Breaking Day, by Marcia Sewall...
...In Phood, the best organized of the pieces, Zaloom plays a lecturer at a food purveyors' convention who enthusiastically recounts the latest inventions while projected texts from industry and government brochures emphasize the startling new artificial ingredients that await the unwary eater...
...The retelling of this African legend is beautifully illustrated with scenes of the life and landscape of the Massai of Kenya and Tanzania...
...14.95 The companionship between a child and his grandfather is lovingly depicted in this gentle poIlrait of an African-American family: (5 to 8) White Peak Farm, by Berlie Doh erty...
...Those books have been listed which seem best to portray relationships among people of different origins, races, and religions, and which depict their varied backgrounds...
...Illustrated by Robert Ingpen...
...13.95 Jonas and Einar's friendship is strained by Einar's secrecy about his past and by the arrival of an Afghan boy in the neighborhood...
...HarperCollins, 1990...
...12 and up) What Would We Do without You...
...Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver...
...He eventually meets his match--the Rockefeller brothers, finance, and politics--and dwindles to human size again, ending with only the World's Fair at Flushing Meadow to plan...
...He discovers humility...
...8 to lo) Life Doesn't Frighten Me at All, by John Agard...
...11.95 The pet which Chanah smuggles aboard ship leads her family into unexpected adventures during their journey from Poland to America in 1910...
...Illustrated by Paul Matin...
...And so The Radiant City ends, too--not so much in a firm statement as in anticlimactic tapering off...
...Haunting translucent watercolors bring the past vividly back to life...
...8 to 10) The Orphan Boy, by Tolowa M. Mollel...
...14.95 Shona, a severely disabled teen living on a Scottish island, is rescued from her isolation when a sensitive American boy teaches her to use his computer to communicate...
...10 and up) New Kids on the Block: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens, by Janet Bode...
...in The Radiant City only the corrupt grace the state government...
...Scribner's, 1990...
...8 to 12) Rice without Rain, by Minfong Ha...
...i2.90 Eleven young immigrants tell their own coming-to-America stories...
...13.95 Describes the life and work of the prolific black author of stories, plays, essays, articles, and recorder of black folklore who was active in the Harlem Renaissance...
...But, with The Fisher King, Gilliam has gone mainstream in the worst way possible: He has taken a stale but potentially commercial script and lavished his visual gifts on it...
...Most of the time he is onstage in one of his puppet forms, and his voice, always redolent with idealism, echoes all through the piece...
...Scribner's, 1990...
...She uses life-size puppets, animated statues, dancing buildings, mechanical devices...
...One of the most amusing devices was the ferris wheel to which Moses heads were attached as his titles were announced and from which they were removed one by one as the Rockefellers established their control...
...14.95 Based on the written records of the Blackfoot Nation that occupied Montana and Canada in the 18th century, this is the story of a girl who sees how the coming of the horse will change her people...
...14.95 Wanda hopes the glamorous jazz singer boarding in her home will introduce her to Elvis Presley, with whom the woman went to school...
...10 and up) Sorrow's Kitchen: The Life and Folklore ofZora Neale Hurston, by Mary E. Lyons...
...Continued on page 692) TOWARDS A SOCIETY THAT SERVES ITS PEOPLE: The Intellectual Contribution of E1 Salvador's Murdered J e s u i t s John Hassett & Hugh Lace...
...This comic novel about a boy whose parents were killed in a trolley crash is entertaining and poignant...
...4.95 Jamaica, who likes to follow her big brother around, learns that big kids don't like to be bothered by- little kids...
...5 to 8) Coconut Kind of Day: Island Poems, byLynn Joseph...
...He is the practical dreamer who knows how to manipulate the political hacks in Albany...
...12 and up) Home Place, by Crescent Dragonwagon...
...14.95 Curiosity gets the better of an old man when he disregards a warning not to uncover the source of his son's secret powers...
...Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1990...
...The Albany hacks were initially amusing a s comic caricature, but the limited animation which allowed them only a few movements made them as tiring as the giant come-on dolls outside funhouses...
...10.95 The concept of peace--what it is and what can destroy it--is introduced to very young children...
...8 to 12) We Have AIDS, by Elaine Landau...
...12 and up) Onion Tears, by Diana Kid& Orchard Books, 1989...
...In Norman Mailer's play, The Deer Park, the hack producer Collie Munshin outlines a sure-fire scenario: MUNSHIN (The hero) goes into television, a bitter kid, he plays the angles...
...Moses, for instance, appears in many forms, most interestingly as a talking head floating in a bubble over the action, least effectively in the giant head, like a fallen statue of Lenin, that looks good on posters and the Playbill cover but could do nothing but ooze on and off stage slowly and pointlessly...
...5 to 8) Peace Begins with You, by Katherine Scholes...
...If this is an account of how Moses led us into the wilderness and left us there, does that mean we were better off in Egypt (Riis's tenements...
...The following selection from the complete list is presented by the publishers named below...
...Lothrop Lee & Shepard, 1990...
...6 to 8) Jamaica Tag-Along, by Juanita Havill...
...Pictures by David Soman...
...HarperCol]ins, 1989...
...One could admire the skill of the men and women who manipulated the puppets, but the piece was finally disappointing...
...Neither of these quite comes through...
...p aul Zaloom's/143' Civilization, like The Radiant City, begins in the prehistorical past (the creation of the earth in Zaloom's case) and quickly jumps to the present...
...Illustrated by Sandra Speidel...
...His bravura keeps The FisherKing twitching, but it's the twitching of a galvanized corpse...
...12 and up) 690: Commonweal Advertisement Saturnalia, by Paul Fleischman...
...For Zaloom, it is a joke...
...Orchard Books: Watts, 1990...
...5 to 8) The Day that Elvis Came to Town, by Jan Marino...
...12.95 Teen-ager Iesper joins the Danish underground to fight the Nazis and finds the courage and strength to engage in sabotage and help the persecuted...
...12 and up) The Week the World Heard Gallaudet, by Jack R. Gannon...
...13.95 Despite the changes and hardships in their lives, it's "Margaret and Maizon: friends forever...
...13.95 As Ahmed's workday takes him through bustling Cairo, he looks forward to sharing his accomplishments with his family...
...4 to 8) 22 November 1991:689 Advertisement Last Summer with Maizon, byJacqueline Woodson...
...12 and up) For the complete "Human Family" booklist, write to: The National Conference of Christians and Jews, 71 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10003 22 November 1991:691 (Continued from page 687) Two singers/readers at stage right provide the narrative for the piece...
...Batchelder Award Honor Book...
...He ceases to hear the voice of the people--if he ever heard it--and dismisses as whiners the citizens who do not want to see their neighborhoods destroyed to make way for the latest Moses project...
...Illustrated by Franc Lessac...
...Beyond that, The Radiant City was disconcerting about what it seemed to be saying...
...29.95 This thorough history of immigration to the United States, beginning with Columbus, is complete with statistics, excellent photographs, and a readable narrative populated with real people...
...find groups that need them...
...14.95 Paintings recreate the mood of old photographs in this biography of a Chinese-American who grew up to become a bullfighter in Spain...
...12 and up) A Woman of Her Tribe, by Margaret A. Robinson...
...Clarion Books, 1990...
...10 and up) The Day of Ahmed's Secret, byFlorence PerryHeide and Judith Heide Gillaland...
...Gilliam's previous films, Time Bandits', Brazil, and Baron Munchausen, were chaotic, but they were, from first shot to last, dreams of a unique, quirky imagination...
...12.95 A childhood memory of Jamaica and a very special doll...
...A Guide to Volunteer Activities for Kids, by Kathy Henderson...
...This novel of racism, alcoholism, and memorable characters is set in the South in the 1960s...
...14.95 This fascinating story of bravery, endurance, and frequent revolt puts to rest the myth that slaves were happy and rarely rebelled...
...And Zaloom remains one of our sharpest and funniest performance artists...
...While a Macbeth and Othello might force these barnstorming geniuses to harness their powers to the freight of subtle characterization and difficult poetry, a crowd-pleasing melodrama or farce simply let them rip into bravura passages of pantomime and rant...
...12.95 Nam-Huong is a Vietnamese girl haunted by the terrors of the war she saw in her childhood...
...Yeats, Attila the Stockbroker, and many more...
...Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1990...
...Even the scenes--like "Traffic," which opens part 2--in which the city and its problems (or its pleasures: "This Is Jones Beach") are the central focus have the hovering Moses just offstage...
...14 and up) A Couple of Kooks and Other Stories about Love, by Cynthia Bylunt...
...14.95 Depicting a co-existence (not a clash) of cultures, this true story picture book is about a Vietnamese girl who lives an "American" life, but keeps Vietnamese traditions in her home...
...I don't know what we can find, but I wouldn't even worry 692: Commonweal...
...3 to 6) The Middle of Somewhere: A Story of South Africa, by Sheila Gordon...
...HarperCollins, 1990...
...Some writers are fecund but King's scriptwriter, Richard La Gravenese, is only busy, busy, busy...
...The story's protagonist (Jeff Bridges) is the callous but hugely successful host of a radio phone-in show who accidentally taunts a demented caller into committing a mass murder...
...ROBERT F. DRINAN, S.J...
...They deliver the pertinent quotations and comments, and sing the music of Christopher Thall and the relentlessly repetitive lyrics of Andrea Balis...
...Their words are compelling, touching, and mature beyond their years as they describe their escape from war, poverty, and repression to carve out new lives in a not always perfect new world...
...Orchard, 1990...
...Visitors from the city bring a culture that could change centuries-old tradition...
...Watts, 1990...
...the last and longest of the pieces, is more characteristic Zaloom, using found objects (some rather elaborate: electric mixers as nuclear power plants) to make satiric points...
...The story about two AfricanAmerican girls is set in present-day Brooklyn...
...But the artistic point of the work lies in Skipitares's conceptions...
...12 and up) The Cat Who Escaped from Steerage: A Bubbemeiser, byEvelyn Wilde Mayerson...
...It covers how to: assess their interests and talents...
...12 and up) Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Russell Freedman...
...21.95 A medical student changes her attitude toward family, tradition, and life after she drops out of school, returns home to teach biology, falls in love with a handsome Apache, and discovers a local ecological disaster...
...Many of the cultures that make up modern America are represented in tales of childhood, family, hope, and faith...
...12 and up) Tales from Gold Mountain: Stories of the Chinese in the New World, by Paul Yee...
...Macmillan, 1990...
...14.98 Eleven authors from different backgrounds tell of growing up...
...12 and up) E1 Chino, by Allen Say...
...14 and up) 688: Commonweal Advertisement Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, by Roger Daniels...
...14.95 Every year, when the daffodils bloom, a family searches the ruins of an old house in the woods and dreams of the people who once lived there...
...Scribners, 1990...
...The story takes place in the turbulent days surrounding the release of Nelson Mandela...
...10 and up) Lee Ann: The Story of a Vietnamese-American Girl, by Tricia Brown...
...The Moses we get is the revisionist one of Robert Caro's biography...
...10 and up) Two Short and One Long, byNina RingAamundsen...
...19.95 A record in text and color photos of the historic week when deaf students declared their right to have a deaf president...
...12.95 Teen-aged Jeannie loves her family's farm in England and assumes life will always go on in the same way...
...Atheneum, 1990...
...Little Brown, 1990...
...handle applications and interviews...
...There would seem to be two possible reasons: as a warning against current planners and--more ambitious-as a cautionary tale on the dangers of idealism...
...The list is the result of agreement by a committee of experts in the field of literature for children and young adults...
...12 and up) When I Am Old with You, by Angela Johnson...
...The show consists of three parts...
...If the S&L and the National Endowment commentaries seem to have fallen behind the current headlines, they still refer to two of our perennial problems--greed and aggressive prudery...
...13.95 Eight short stories explore love and romance for special people at all stages of life...
...14.95 Member of the Wampanoags, the Native Americans encountered by the Pilgrims, describe their beliefs and daily lives...
...5 to 8) Fast Talk on a Slow Track, byRita Williams-Garcia...
...Illustrated by Ted Lewin...
...Zaloom has been in Philadelphia recently, introducing the Movement Theatre International's new season, with a show that is essentially the one that I saw last year at the Pennsylvania Academy...
...12.95 In rural Thailand, 17-year-old Jinda's family struggles to survive...
...Filled with details about Blackfoot life, the book presents young people with a heroine from a distant culture...
...STAGE PULLING STRINGS 'RADIANT CITY' & 'CIVILIZATION' heodora Skipitares's The Radiant City at the American Place Theatre, the story of the building of a not-so-radiant city, begins in the ice age, but moves quickly, by way of projected maps (not enough maps, said a fellow playgoer who works at Hammond), to the founding and the uglification of New York City...
...13.95 Caribbean rhythms vibrate through this original collection of colorflllly illustrated poetry...
...13.95 Archbishop Tutu's life is interwoven with the political history of South Africa...
...12 and up) The Flawed Glass, by lan Strachan...
...His plot has many layers and all of them are stale...
...Henry Holt & Co., 1990...
...REV...
...12.95 The personal accounts of nine children with AIDS reveal their families' reactions, searches for medical treatments, and hopes for a cure...
...Lodestar Books, 1991...
...Without facing the vulgarity of the election process, Moses garners one appointive position after another, solidifying the power to remake the city to the image he carries in his mind...
...13.95 A nine-year-old black girl and her family fight the forced evacuation from theiic homes to make way for a white suburb...
...Beginning his own autobiography with so august an event, he sets in comic perspective the ordinary business of being born, growing up, going to school, discovering sex, making one's way in the world--which, come to think of it, is rather extraordinary business after all...
...Paintings by Simon Ng...
...Orchard, 1990...
...He wasn't just daydreaming but thinking all along...
...The blemish on the promise can be heard in one sentence of the quotation from the celebrated city planner/architect, in which he indicates that the building of the city must begin with moving the people out...
...his suspicion of blacks leads him to devise ways to keep them from using Jones Beach...
...14.95 A powerful, realistic, and humorous novel about an 18-yearold black student's self-discovery in a summer program for incoming minority students at Princeton...
...To order call or write: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS Room 111, Intercultural Center, Washlngton, DC 20057-1079 Phone: (202) 687-6063 / FAX: (202) 687-6340 22 November 1991:687 Advertisement Breaking the Chains: African-American Slave Resistance, by William Loren Katz...
...14.95 Haunting illustrations accompany eight original stories about the Chinese immigrant experience in North America...
...Watts, 1989...
...Editors ISBN 0 87840-523-2, paper, $14.95...
...Build him as a heel and then give the switch...
...5 to 8) Code Name Kris, by Carol Matas...
...It opens with the autobiographical piece which depends for its comic effects on his range of voices and on the toys and cutouts and liquids that gain iconic stature--well, sort of--as he deploys them on the projector...
...Meanwhile...
...The celebrity's conscience plunges him to psychological and economic depths where he meets one of the victims of the slaughter (Robin Williams), a former medieval history professor whose wife's murder turned him into a hallucinating street person...
...12 and up) Cousins, by Virginia Hamilton, Philomel Books, 1990...
...Franklin Watts, 1989...
...Delacorte, 1990...
...14.95 A collection of poems celebrating life, assembled by a Guyanese poet and writer, proves that poets can be "man or woman, black or white, old or young...from all sorts of cultures...and all streams of life...
...Orchard, 1990...
...But love, death, and a career bring inevitable changes...
...16.95 Carefully selected photographs and a well researched and highly readable text tell the story of an extraordinary and controversial man during the Depression and World War II...
...Betterway Publications, 1990...
...Clarion, 1990...
...The author is the recipient of an award from the Council on Interracial Books for Children...
...12.95 Jeffrey Magee's identity comes from his wild side...
...12.95 The many sides of Boston in 1681 are shown through the story of William, a young Indian captive turned printer's apprentice, who searches for his brother and his past...
...Houghton Mifflin, 1990...
...constitutes an indispensible source for all those who desire to understand the torment and the turbulence of E1 Salvador and Central America...
...12.95 Annette, half English, half Nootka Indian, must decide how to reconcile the ways of her Indian heritage learned in rural Canada with her new life after her family moves to modern Victoria...
...There are some, if not enough, changes and additions-particularly in Meanwhile..., the section that deals with current events--but the material and the method are the ones that he has been polishing in and out of New York during the last year or so...
...8 to 10) The Chalk Doll, by Charlotte Pomerantz...
...On this note, a new visionary arrives, Robert Moses, who will dominate the rest of the evening...
...Included are Maya Angelou, W.B...
...She must learn peace, love, friendship, and security in her new home while living with the ghosts of her past...
...Discriminating moviegoers might have a good time at The Fisher King if they see that its director, Terry Gilliam, is functioning here visually in the same way that those old actors performed histrionically...
...It was never as much fun nor as frightening as the works of some other practitioners of the art--Julie Taymor, for instance, or to take a more obvious political example, the Bread and Puppet Theater...
...10 to 14) Michael, by Tony Bradman...
...Houghton Mifflin, 1990...
...He moves back and forth among litter-covered card tables, using the titular connective as a bridge, as he intermeshes his accounts of nuclear hazards, art censorship, the S&L scandal, the collapsing real estate market...
...He talks of parks for people, but means some of the people...
...12 and up) Desmond Tutu, by Dennis Wepman...
...10 and up) A Gathering of Flowers: Stories about Being Young in America, by Joyce Carol Thomas, HarperCollins, 1990...
...Bridges commits himself to this unfortunate's recovery and thus redeems himself...
...He sees the automobile as necessary to the growth of a great city and devises a road and bridge system that will strangle the city by giving birth to ever more automobiles...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
