![]() ![]() including Ant Colony, First Year Healthy, Big Kids, and Sticks Angelica. Like Ant Colony and First Year Healthy, Big Kids is a testimony to the harshness and beauty of being alive. Michael DeForges Leaving Richards Valley expands from a bizarre heros quest into. ![]() And slowly, the boy begins to change, too.Įerie and perfectly paced, DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with during adolescence, the choices we make to fit in, and the ways we survive times of change. ![]() Instead, he hangs out with April and her friends, a bunch of highly evolved big kids who spend their days at the campus swimming pool. The boy's own interests quickly fade away: he stops engaging in casual sex, taking drugs, and testing the limits of socially acceptable (and legal) behavior. She's a college student, mysterious and cool, and she quickly takes a shine to the boy. When the boy's uncle, a police officer, gets kicked out of the family's basement apartment and transferred to the countryside, April moves in. It follows a troubled teenage boy through the transformative years of high school as he redefines his friends, his interests, and his life path. ![]() Big Kids is simultaneously Michael DeForge's most straightforward narrative and his most complex work to date. ![]()
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![]() ![]() 'The future will require us to build better places,' Kunstler says, 'or the future will belong to other people in other societies.' Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. ![]() It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. ![]() The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The third chapter jumps forward in time, to after Bart’s tour of duty has ended, and he is in Germany, awaiting departure back home to the U.S. Late in the chapter, before they ship out, we find out that Bart promised Murph’s mother to “bring him home to ” (47). Another key figure, Sergeant Sterling, also comes into clearer focus in this chapter, as “harsh but fair” (33), and pairs the two up. ![]() Then it moves back in time to Bart at Fort Dix, New Jersey before the platoon has shipped out, when he first meets eighteen-year-old Murph. The next chapter reveals that Bart will eventually forge a letter to Murph’s mother as if it were from him, something he regrets. Throughout the chapter, Bart reflects on death, fate, and unknowability of the future. Bart also reveals that his friend, Murph (Daniel Murphy), will die sometime in the near future. In the opening chapter, the platoon’s interpreter, Malik, is killed in a fire fight, and a few days later Bart and his fellow soldiers kill an elderly couple apparently attempting to flee the village during a skirmish. ![]() ![]() One of them, Ben Brantley of the New York Times, observes with only minor exaggeration that “ Angels brought theater back into the national conversation.” So it did, if only for a time. The inception and reception of Angels have been chronicled in The World Only Spins Forward, a book-length oral history compiled by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois.* Based on interviews with 250 people who took part in or saw its early productions, it documents the impact that Angels had on its first viewers. Now it has returned to Broadway in a production from the National Theatre in London, where it was greeted with near-universal acclaim, much of it from critics who were not yet born when the real-life events depicted by Kushner took place. Taken together, the two parts of Angels in America-running seven-and-a-half hours in all-were widely thought to constitute the most important American play of the late 20th century. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It brought Kushner a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony, and that Tony was followed by another when its second half, Angels in America: Perestroika, opened six months later. When Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches opened on Broadway a quarter-century ago, it became the most talked-about theatrical event of its day. ![]() |