Tag: chicago tribune

Theater of Cruelty

My friend John tossed me this book to review for monthly arts and politics journal The Brooklyn Rail about one of the 20th century’s first women playwrights, crime reporter turned dramatist Maurine Watkins, author of Chicago, which was a biting, satirical straight play long before it was a Kander, Ebb & Fosse musical.  Enjoy the review, or, more importantly, enjoy the book.

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Douglas Perry
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired ‘Chicago’
(Viking, 2010)

Close on the heels of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010), comes Douglas Perry’s true crime history The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago, which turned out to be a welcome companion piece.

The former is a dissection of New York City’s use and rapid improvement of nascent forensic medical techniques during the Prohibition era.  Murder after murder is lovingly recreated—especially those involving poisons—and then deconstructed by über CSI experts. The latter book takes us to Prohibition-era Chi-town, where the weapon of choice wasn’t poison but pistols, and the bad guys were bad gals.    Cont’d at the Brooklyn Rail>>

Tesla’s Letters Review in the Chicago Tribune

TimeLine’s ‘Tesla’ tough going, but winning and potent

Among the many reasons to be heartsick at the state of the Chicago Transit Authority is its continued reliance on direct-current motors to drive its trains. As the CTA has been saying for years, it needs to convert to the alternating-current propulsion system used in New York and Washington. Nimble AC trumps dogmatic DC every time. But what, you’re surely thinking, do the myriad woes of the CTA have to do with “Tesla’s Letters,” a play by Jeffrey Stanley at Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre about the eccentric Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla?

Plenty. Tesla was the father of that superior AC current. But when he tried to push his work in the United States, he ran into the existing brand name in electricity invention, one Thomas Edison, who wasn’t about to share that glory. Edison did his best to discredit Tesla, at one point even turning him into a digger of ditches for the then DC-driven Edison Co.

That’s worth a play in itself. But Stanley went further in his 1999 drama, seeing America’s shabby treatment of the Croatian-born but proudly Serbian Tesla as a metaphor for its lack of interest in the genocidal conflict of the 1990s that ripped apart Yugoslavia and resulted in the deaths of more than a million people. CONT’D