A Play For These Times

Nov 4, 2004

One nice thing about our new neighborhood is the ease with which we can get into Manhattan. A short 2-block walk up Park Place takes us to the Seventh Avenue subway station. Then one, two stops in Brooklyn and the third is in Manhattan! Super cool!

Tonight we hit Broadway. It was raining. We used to drive in from Manhattan Beach. The traffic in New York on a rainy Thursday night in Times Square ... well forget about it! But by Subway in 20 minutes or so we were on Broadway having a pre-theater gin and tonic (and steamed vegetable dumplings to quell the hunger) at Ollie's Noodle Shop & Grille on 44th Street.

The play? It was a perfect play for the post-election blues that we're all feeling: Twelve Angry Men at the American Airlines Theater on 42nd Street. Written by Reginald Rose in 1954, it is a brilliant piece of drama that is oh so relevant for our poor country today.


Don't miss this play starring Phillip Bosco (Juror number 3) as relevant now as in 1954 when it was written for TV.

Eleven of twelve jurors, all men, are subjected to the lies and machinations of the D.A., and are ready to quickly sentence a 16-year old to the electric chair. The twelfth has doubts and by reason and logic he pursues justice.

There's a message here for all of us who struggled so hard to defeat Bush. Half of our populace is under a spell, woven by the Bush Bunch and the servile mass media. They've been subjected to lies and a campaign of smear and fear. In Twelve Angry Men, just one of eleven was able to turn the jury around; able to move people to stop and think and change; able to convince people to break their chains of fear and prejudice.

So too, I believe, can we reach our fellow Americans who are under a spell of lies and deception and change their deceived perception of reality. How else to explain this vote for a man whose policies are so injurious to their very own self interests?

This is not pollyannish idealism. To wallow in depression; to give up the ghost before the fight is finished means we accept defeat and that the battle is over. To be sure, the election has dire consequences for our country and the world. But the struggle continues.

As Howard Zinn, the great American historian, wrote recently on the election results:

"In this awful world where the efforts of caring
people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a
possibility of changing the world...

...An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."**

** For the complete Howard Zinn quote, just click here.

Please run, don't walk, to see Twelve Angry Men. I promise you an uplifting, post-election tonic and a wonderful evening of drama.

A little bonus, afterwards, was a parade down Broadway of Smart Cars (you see them all over Europe) in town as pace cars for this weekends NYC Marathon.

Smart Cars on parade on Broadway - in town for the NYC Marathon this Sunday.