What a great read! Jay Gabler’s response to this play is a multi-layered, thought-provoking conversation that inadvertently makes a case for why art is an essentail tool to aid us in processing complicated ideas in the first place.

I have a greater chance of winning the lottery than this show has to be seen in Northeast Pennsylvania yet we have middle-aged couple dining at Olive Gardens confused by young white gangsta wannabees. 

Read this story.

-ag

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"The Scottsboro Boys" at the Guthrie: Dancing with demons | Twin Cities Daily Planet
To revive minstrelsy for 21st-century entertainment means treading between two gaping chasms of risk. On the one hand, a postmodern approach that treated the form with too much ironic remove would be offensive. On the other hand, an overly cautious production that treated the form as a museum piece, like a Klan hood hanging in the Smithsonian, would have a hard time justifying its own existence. Why revive racist entertainment just to tell us what we already know about it?