A Word or Two on What I Saw But Didn't Write About

While the Steiny Road Poet has not really emerged from her winter funk, she is feeling burdened by plays and films she saw in recent months that she made no comment on. Here is her top down list.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by monologist Mike Daisey





Daisey is an amazing performer whose face can tell any story. The Poet is into Apple computer products as he is and she gets his shtick about Apple using cheap Chinese labor to line the pocketbooks of Apple's Steve Jobs and company. Because she has been to China recently and she has been reading the modern accounts of Chinese workers, she says Daisey didn't really give that story as much umph as he needed to. Does he really think American audiences can't handle what deprivations those Chinese workers suffer? And why didn't he suggest bringing the work back home to the States? Still, if you have the time and the money,  the Poet says don't miss Daisey at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. The Poet saw him in The Last Cargo Cult and she thinks he knows what he is talking about but most of all he is an outstanding performer.







Photograph 51

Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51 explores the unrewarded life of British geneticist Rosalind Franklin. This play at DC's Theater J is a story that will appeal to feminists and anyone who believes in ethical workplace practice. The Poet doesn't believe Republicans will sympathize with the protagonist in this male dominated cast where mostly what the men want from Rosie or Ms. Franklin (they refuse to call her Dr. Franklin which is what she prefers) is her sexual favors since it was much easier to steal her painstaking work that led to Nobel Prizes for others. In real life Franklin perished from cancer and her so-called colleagues got the Nobel after she died. Nobel Prizes only go to the living. The Poet thinks Ziegler is quite inventive with how she keeps the audience engaged in a play with many talking heads.




Probably you will have to wait for the DVD appearance of  the Korean film Poetry directed by Lee Chang-dong and starring the long absent, but formerly well know star, Yoon Jeong-hee but keep this at the top of your list. The Steiny Road Poet saw the film when it opened in NYC and with a Korean scholar who explained the joke scene and how many of the performers are local people and not professional actors. Even so, the film hardly needs the extra gloss. It's a story about a grandmother raising a teenage boy who gets into very serious trouble with his friends and how she if forced to handle this.





Other Films (good for Friday night entertainment):


The Lincoln Lawyer -- The Poet loved this street-smart bad-ass lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey who shares a daughter with a district attorney Marisa Tomei.


Limitless -- Who doesn't want to be the smartest person possible? This movie starring Bradley Cooper with a more secondary role by Robert de Niro shows the pitfalls of finding the magic smart pill.