Culture

Barebones Delivers a Visceral Portrayal of Working America in “Skeleton Crew”

Usually, critics try to bury the lead, but I’m going to say outright that Barebones Productions may be the most authentic theater company in America today.  This is not to denigrate any other company, nor to say that Barebones is the best theater company, but what they have done over the past couple of years …

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Finny Cora

Finny Cora Finbar bolted down a big breakfastand walked with his best humanto the greenwhere he had his morning poop–on the way back twenty paces from homeall four feetwent out from under him . . . heart gone that mercifully quick Cora outlived her mateby three yearsslowing down. . . and down . . . …

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monkey bars

monkey bars it’s lifting your feet as trains pass,holding your breath near graves—it’s hidingshivers as you angel in the snow. it’s filling your rain boots with puddles,water-logged Velcrotoo soggy to stick––it’s gum, decades-old,decayingunder desks.  it’s crunching leavesonce they orange;their sound bites like brown-bagged lunch—it’s cartons of milk curdlingin heatwaves. it’s stuffing inch wormsin pocketsand forgettingby laundry day—it’s hanginghand-me-downsyou’re sureare shrinking.  it was sitting on daddy’s suitcase,your …

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Longing for Limelight

Hollywood has been alternately described over the years as “a tissue thin façade full of self-important narcissists” and “a place where dreams come alive.” This year’s winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Kelly Sather, paints her protagonists as dreamy, never-will-bes who dwell in the shadows of fame. The California native and former entertainment lawyer …

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I Could Live There

I Could Live There A colonial perchedon a leafy hillside—its yarda backslope of rhododendronand weed, a bit of grasshere and there— I could live there, I thinkas the train rolls by. But then I see a perfect woodof evenly spaced pinesand long to lie on the warmed fallen needles, their scent a relieffrom housekeeping tedium.I …

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Pittsburgh Opera Goes Back to the Future with a Moving “Iphigénie En Tauride”

The conceit of the “what if” story has always fascinated us: what if Ebenezer Scrooge hadn’t been visited by his ghosts in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” or if George Bailey hadn’t had the intervention of the angel Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or if Marty McFly hadn’t gone back in time to make sure …

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Buying Fragments of God: The Crazy Art World of the 1980s

If the 1960s changed America’s consciousness for the better, the 1980s certainly changed American commercialism for the worse. And to have lived during this latter period in New York City was to have felt the first tremors of this change, much like living near the epicenter of an earthquake and experiencing its initial shockwaves before …

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When Did Prison Become My Home?

When Did Prison Become My Home? My wife had to leave me first,saying so over the phone,the fifteen-minute inmate call long enoughfor her to speak pregnant & separationso I knew my home was not my home.Then came work, waving its armslike a candidate for office,promising a few extra dollarsin my trustee account. Too,I wrote poems …

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Real-life Heroes

On Jan. 25, 1904, 179 mostly teenaged miners died in a massive explosion at the Harwick Mine near Cheswick, where today a stone memorial marks their mass grave. A single survivor, Adolph Gunia, was pulled from the rubble by the mine’s designer, Selwyn Taylor, and his assistant, James McCann. Volunteers like Daniel Lyle dug through …

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mountebank afternoon

mountebank afternoon (for angele ellis) contrails fadesun tries to breathelife into the old city mission the art deco erawritten in lamppostwatched by eaglesbronzed in way back the wind across mountebankafternoon stretches a flagto the point it could break then take to the skya kite of a freedom imaginedlike the leaves that decoratethese hillsides bare trees

Dougherty’s Debut Highlights the Bonds Among Five Female Friends

Of her debut novel, Pittsburgh native Marianne Dougherty says it’s “about the power of female friendships to sustain us” — an accurate portrayal of what plays out over 380 brisk-reading pages. With a host of well-regarded freelance work in both local and national platforms, Dougherty has penned a tale about what bonds her strong feminine …

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His Father’s Son

For the first 37 years following his 1945 birth, August Wilson was a Pittsburgh nobody, abandoned by his white German father, Frederick August Kittel, and disdained by his black mother, Daisy Wilson, once he dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Self-educated thanks to thousands of hours spent in multiple Carnegie Library branches, Freddy …

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Noteworthy

Different Views of Christopher ColumbusOn Oct. 12, in Madrid, Spain, an enormous and colorful parade of national pride snaked its way through the streets of the Spanish capital. The “National Day of Spain” is the country’s biggest civic holiday, celebrating Spanish history and achievements and reconfirming Spaniards’ commitment to the nation’s future. The date commemorates …

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Interstate Five

Interstate Five What remains of these lost deltasafter the mills shut down: an artof disappearing, black-windowed bars,the towers of a closed factorystill blinking their red lights to hideno work’s inside. For yearsI drove past these roadside dinerscarved out of rain, trailer parks linedwith European trees, the truck stopwhere cigarette smoke driftsinto the air like a …

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Pittsburgh Tomorrow

When I came to Pittsburgh in 1985, it was a great city — the late David McCullough called it “the essential American city.” But it was a great city in shock. The massive industrial economy had collapsed and 150,000 to 200,000 mainly young people were leaving for greener pastures. I expected to stay for my …

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Combining the Political and Artistic

We live a media world, constantly bombarded with unprecedented information delivered on various platforms. It can be next to impossible to separate fact and from, but everyone has the right to an opinion.  Many still believe that the art museum, the so-called palace of culture, should remain steeped in the beautiful and provide an escape …

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Barebones’ “American Buffalo” is Stunning and Revelatory Theater

In trying to describe the essence of strong writing – and ultimately, all art — the poet Wallace Stevens said, “A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect, but most likely, the opposite.”  What we have in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” (1975) is the embodiment of this ethos, as the play brings …

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Stronger than Hate? We Need to Prove it Now 

Five years ago, Pittsburgh was shocked by the horrifying acts of a hate-filled gunman who murdered 11 people and injured many others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill.    On October 7, just 20 days before the five-year anniversary of that mass killing in Pittsburgh, the world was shocked when Hamas terrorists savagely …

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Broken Politics is Hardly Limited to Allegheny County

I agree with Editor Douglas Heuck’s piece entitled “The Broken Politics of Allegheny County.” I moved across the state in 1986 to the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, in part because I was tired of the political scene in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County; not that it’s proven to be any better here. Obvious and commonly …

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How Much Do Voters Care About the Future of Allegheny County?

(This story appeared in the Fall issue under the headline: The Broken Politics of Allegheny County.)  I was on vacation in Michigan this summer, walking down a path to collect my daughter’s dog, when two old friends said hello from a cottage porch. One, from Cincinnati, gets the magazine and asked what the subject of …

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The Making of the Mafia

There’s a scene in season one of “the Sopranos” when teen daughter Meadow asks, “Who invented the Mafia?” The question leaves Tony to consider how to respond with a mouthful of mu shu pork. That she then names those five New York City families with ease exemplifies the way La Cosa Nostra has become ingrained …

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Is Life Ahead or Within

After meeting his doctor for his annual checkup, a 70-year-old patient told the doctor, “Checkups or no checkups, we all have to die one day. It’s just a question of when.” The doctor shook his patient’s hand and said, “Not when, but how.” That brief exchange reveals not only two different attitudes toward life but …

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