STAGE: Can you Hear Their Voices

From Theatermania: Before the New Deal's Works Progress Administration and the Federal Theatre Project, there was Can You Hear Their Voices? (A Play of Our Time) written by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford. The play, based on the true story of a 1931 Arkansas drought, revealed a rural world of hunger and privation that was horribly neglected by government bureaucracy. With today's frequent and casual use of labels like "Communist" and "Socialist," Peculiar Works Project mines this landmark agitprop play to uncover how such words were interpreted in an earlier--yet remarkably similar--era. The news media constantly reminds us how our current economic situation is the worst "since the Great Depression;" Voices shines a spotlight on the root causes for radical political movements then and now.

Closes 6/27

ART/BOOK: Ode To The Snapshot! Eudora Welty @ the Museum of the City of New York

I love me a good old Depression-era WPA photo! And, having traveled throughout Mississippi and NYC as a WPA press officer in the 1930’s, Eudora Welty has made plenty of them.

"[My snapshots] were taken spontaneously - to catch something as I came upon it, something that spoke of life going on around me. A snapshot's now or never."

Mississippi writer/photographer Eudora Welty would have turned 100 in 2009 and a year of celebratory centennial events kicks off today in NYC with a symposium on her work and an opening reception for Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s, an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.The connection between Eudora Welty's celebrated writings and her photographs will be among the topics discussed by some of America's most distinguished writers, all of whom were friends of Welty. Suzanne Marrs, author of Eudora Welty: A Biography (Harcourt, 2005), will moderate a roundtable discussion that includes Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist; Robert MacNeil, journalist and former co-host of PBS's "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour"; and Reynolds Price, novelist and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Exhibition opening reception to follow.

Co-sponsored by PEN American Center and the Eudora Welty Foundation and presented in conjunction with Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s which runs thru 2/16/09.