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Notebook: Theater of Renewal in Rhode Island Village

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It is the theater paradox: regional performances are often as good or better than those in big cities, and even those in the hallowed locales of Broadway and the West End of London.

Away from the established talent and the marquee names, theater flourishes, sometimes in the most modest venues. Having been a theater critic in various places, including London and Washington, I can attest to the fact that theater is where you find it. I saw productions of “Evita” in London, New York and a dinner theater in Manassas, Va.

So I was delighted to find The Arctic Playhouse in Rhode Island, just a short distance from my home. The little theater – and I mean little — is without pretensions. It is as modest as can be and, in its way, a little treasure.

Arctic, in its day, was a destination village in West Warwick, R.I.: a place where professionals lived and shoppers came from afar. But the development of malls nearby doomed little Arctic. Now it is a sad place with an aged population: The senior center is a happening place for many of the residents.

Arctic is proud but poor with businesses that have held on from better days; businesses like Rockway Tailoring and Dry Cleaners (still run by the family which opened its doors 132 years ago), Cayouette Shoe & Leather Repair and Rogers Paint Service Store.

For all of its boarded-up shops, Arctic is fighting back. The symbol of its fight is The Arctic Playhouse, located in a former dog salon on the main street. It was founded by three Rhode Islanders, Jim Belanger, Lloyd Felix and David Vieira, who wanted to arrest the decay in the village.

Though lacking in many amenities, Arctic now has a live theater, which few villages can claim. It is small, seating just 90 people, and very “villagey,” adding to its charm. Audiences are local, pricing ($10 for many performances) is keen. There is a cash bar, free popcorn in red-striped cups and cookies baked by volunteers.

The curtain metaphorically (there isn’t one) rises weekends to some rattling good productions, either the playhouse’s own or those of New England amateur companies. The lights go up and the players are in front of you — so close that you feel you are in the play yourself.

Whether I have seen a production in a full or half-empty house, I have sensed that the audience is part of the performance. One feels responsible for the players and the play.

My wife and I are regulars and have been enchanted. Next year, The Arctic Playhouse moves to a new home, still on the main street, still in a converted shop, but with better facilities and more seats.

The curtain is going up on renewal in Arctic, one show at a time.

Before There Was Trump, There Was Cleon

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By Kevin Morrell

Following Donald Trump’s inauguration as president the world is anticipating a new, and potentially radically different era for the United States. The inauguration also prompts questions about this new style of politics.

Trump’s surge to leading the most powerful nation in the world was fueled by a rhetoric we associate with a new term: post-truth. The Oxford dictionary named post-truth its word of the year in 2016, and defined it as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Brexit, and Trump’s success were new lows for many of us, particularly in higher education, precisely because facts came a distant second to populist appeals.

But, as a number of people have identified, post-truth didn’t begin with Trump.

One reference point for the two campaigns 2016 will be remembered for has been the propagandism of the 1930s, and two wickedly cynical pieces of advice: repeat lies often enough until they are accepted as true, or remember if you are going to lie, tell a big lie.

But almost a century earlier, in the 1850s, there was a far dirtier U.S. election campaign where an anti-immigration party, the Know-Nothings, actively thrived on pretending to be ignorant of their own party’s activities.

Further back still, before U.S. independence, the satirist John Arbuthnot wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it, so that when Men come to be undeceived, it is too late … like a physician who has found out an infallible medicine after the patient is dead.” The title of his 1712 essay? “The Art of Political Lying.”

And way, way before Arbuthnot, in 350 BC, Aristotle’s “Constitution of Athens” describes the demagogue Cleon in a way Trump critics might recognize: “The cause of the corruption of the democracy by his wild undertakings.”

A closer look at Cleon invites several parallels with how critics see Trump. Cleon inherited his wealth from his father in the form of a tannery, a leather factory; certainly, the Athenian equivalent of blue-collar.

He rose to power in 430 BC, during a desperate time for Athens — it was at war with Sparta and was devastated by plague. Plutarch describes him as someone who “catered to the pleasure of the Athenians” with a combination of “mad vanity,” “versatile buffoonery” and “disgusting boldness.”

Cleon had a distinctive and shocking communication style, one Athenians had never seen before. While speaking, he would hitch his cloak up and slap his thighs, running and yelling at the crowds.

Aristotle says he was “the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse.” Aside from this radically new communication style, Cleon’s populism was based on attacking two enemies.

First, though wealthy himself, he was an anti-establishment figure, pursuing a “relentless persecution of the upper classes.”

Second, he was a flag-waving xenophobe, antagonistic towards Athens’ rival and (partly thanks to Cleon) bitter enemy Sparta, as well as to the city of Mytilene, who wanted independence from Athens.

The Athenian general and historian Thucydides even records a speech where Cleon expresses admiration for Mytilene’s “unassailable” walls.

Parallels don’t end there. A later Athenian writer, Lucian, suggests Cleon profited from exploiting his office as some warn Trump is set to do and that he was “venal to excess” (as Trump detractors suggest).

He was boastful, once bragging that he could win a war against some Spartans by himself. He was thin-skinned and censorious, as well as a litigious bully.

Cleon tried, unsuccessfully, to have the satirist Aristophanes prosecuted for writing “The Babylonians,” which he considered a treasonable play — in the process turning Aristophanes into a lifelong enemy.

He accused Athenian generals of incompetence and, in establishment-bashing mode tried, unsuccessfully, to prosecute one of them, Laches.

Cleon was held responsible for the eventual exile of another, Thucydides, who as well as being a general is sometimes described as the founder of history.

Indeed, Thucydides’ contribution was to found a tradition of historians as being concerned with facts and the truth.

Throughout this period Cleon was the biggest obstacle to normal relations with Sparta and within a year of his death a peace treaty was agreed.

History was certainly not kind to Cleon, and perhaps Trump will not be showered in praise either.

In Cleon’s case this was no surprise perhaps given that he exiled the most eminent Athenian historian and tried to silence the most eminent Athenian satirist.

Nowadays Cleon is most well-known through Aristophanes’ play, “The Knights” (far ruder than “Saturday Night Live”).

This has an unusually small cast because it is essentially a relentless assault on the character Paphlagon, who is obviously based on Cleon: “the leather-seller” with a “gaping arse,” “a perfect glutton for beans” who loudly “farts and snores,” an “arrant rogue” and “mud-stirrer” with a “pig’s education” and the “stink of leather” — “this villain, this villain, this villain! I cannot say the word too often, for he is a villain a thousand times a day.”

Cleon may well have had a front-row seat for “The Knights,” where he would have seen Aristophanes playing Paphlagon/Cleon, presumably because no one else dared to.

Characters in these plays were masked, but no prop-maker dared make a mask resembling Cleon.

We might imagine Cleon later reviewing “The Knights” as: “A totally one-sided, biased show — overrated! The theater must always be a safe and special place. Apologize!”

What matters is that Aristophanes’ contemporaries awarded “The Knights” first prize at the Lenaia festival (something like Athens’ Cannes Festival).

Cleon’s brand of post-truth politics flourished because when life is extremely hard, facts are not as novel or distracting as sensationalism.

Some Athenians were won over by the novel spectacle of yelling, coarse abuse and thigh-slapping — and distracted by diversionary ranting against Sparta.

Critics of Brexit and Trump might say voters were won over by bus-sized gimmicks or tweet-sized slogans — where both camps painted “enemy” over an anonymous other.

Last year was a bad year in which millions were desperate for change, but perhaps what we saw was an age-old spectacle. Populism and appeals to emotion always work on some people. When times are bad enough they work on enough people.

One consolation for Trump’s opponents and Remainers is that the Athenians kept Cleon partly in check using existing governance mechanisms: the courts.

They can also take comfort that contemporary culture remembers Cleon through the eyes of his bitter enemy Aristophanes. Cleon’s era was horrific yet it also became a golden age for satire and saw the birth of the discipline of history.

The worst fears for the Trump presidency are bleak, but civilization survived Cleon. Shortly after his death, we saw another kind of Athenian golden age — with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle laying down the basis for Western philosophy and civilization.

They taught the importance of skepticism and scrutiny, and of virtue. They placed the ultimate premium on the search for knowledge and truth.

In the “Rhetoric” Aristotle gave us all the tools we need to see through a Cleon. Indeed, he wanted rhetoric to be widely understood so politicians’ arguments were evaluated on their merits rather than the wrapper (or bus) they arrived in.

Kevin Morrell is professor of strategy at the Warwick Business School, part of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. He researches rhetoric in politics.

 

Ireland Diary: Dublin and Kilkenny

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By Linda Gasparello

“But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.” — James Joyce, “Dubliners”

Ireland is always an adventure.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have traveled there frequently since the early 1980s. Our first trip, on which we drove with friends from Dublin to Dingle, gave us some of our most memorable impressions of the country.

Nearly every summer from 1989-2010, we traveled to Ballina, Co. Mayo, in the west of Ireland, to participate in the Humbert Summer School (named after one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean Joseph Amable Humbert), founded by journalist John Cooney for “the study of Ireland and Europe.” It was a Brigadoon-like event, attracting academics, politicians, musicians, writers and many faithful regulars – who Cooney called “Hubertians” — from all over Ireland and abroad.

The school’s sessions took place in many Mayo venues, from Moyne College and Murphy Brothers Bar & Restaurant in Ballina to the Golden Acres pub in Kilalla and Bessie’s Bar in Kilcummin — a beachead on the county’s northern coast, where a French expedition commanded by Gen. Humbert landed on Aug. 22, 1798, in an attempt to assist Irish rebels during the 1798 Rebellion.

During those summers Humbertians did a lot of thinking, heightened by a lot of drinking.

Shortly before the election, Llewellyn and I traveled to Ireland to attend the Association of European Journalists’ (AEJ) annual meeting, held in Kilkenny this year. The association skirts the high cost of holding meetings in Europe’s big cities by holding their annual in small ones, like Maastricht, Netherlands, Burgenland, Austria and Sibiu, Romania.

In addition to its serious purpose, the AEJ annual meeting has much of the fun and good fellowship as did the Humbert School. A few of its members were also Humbert regulars, including our friends David Haworth, who lives in Brussels and writes for The Irish Daily Mail, and Joe Carroll, who covered Washington and the Clinton White House for The Irish Times.

“There’s no friends like the old friends,” Joyce also wrote in “Dubliners.”

Two Celebrations in Dublin

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The 12th-century Kilkenny Castle from the porch of the Rivercourt Hotel. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Christmas is nearing in Ireland. The shops on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare — and one of the widest in Europe — are brimming with decorations and merchandise. But even as the Irish start celebrating the holidays, they have not yet finished celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which set Ireland on the path to its independence in 1922.

The holiday light vines on the lamp posts in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street illuminate banners that say, “Dublin Remembers 1916.” Walk down the street to Eason and you’ll see the bookstore’s front display tables laden with 1916-23 histories, from Fearghal McGarry’s “The Rising Ireland: Easter 1916 to Tim Pat Coogan’s “DeValera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow.”

Abeba, an Ethopian woman visiting Dublin, leafed through Sinead McCoole’s “Easter Widows: Seven Irish Women Who Lived in the Shadow of the 1916 Rising.” She told me, “ I took the 1916 bus tour. Now I want to read about women of the time.”

She had taken Dublin Bus’s “The 1916 Tour — Beyond Barricades,” in which on-board actors and film immerse passengers in the rebellion. “Dublin was in flames, and you really felt like you were there,” Abeba said.

The previous day, a bank holiday, my husband and I had taken the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. One loop included Kilmainham Jail, where the seven signatories to the declaration of The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic were executed from May 3-12, 1916.

Our driver told us that he had named his daughter Grace, after Grace Gifford, a gifted artist and cartoonist who was active in the Republican movement. Gifford married her fiance Joseph Mary Plunkett in the jail’s chapel only a few hours before he was executed for being a leader of the rebellion.

As we neared the jail, our driver sang a refrain from “Grace,” often sung by the late Jim McCann of The Dubliners folk band fame:

Oh, Grace just hold me in your arms, and let this moment linger,
They take me out at dawn and I will die.
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger,
There won’t be time to share our love, so we must say good-bye.

Our driver told us that Kilmainham is a very busy site, and prebooking tickets is essential, especially during this centenary year. However, he said, there is easy access to the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, where our tour ended and where the Rising began.

“It came under heavy bombardment for a week. You can still see the bullet holes on the pillars and walls. Gutted by fire, it did not reopen until 1929,” he said.

The Rising began on April 24, 1916, and lasted six days. Early Easter Monday, 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, under the command of Patrick Pearse, a Gaelic scholar, schoolteacher and poet, and James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, with others seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street (now called O’Connell). On the building’s front steps, Pearse read the declaration, addressed to “The People of Ireland” and signed by himself, Connolly, Plunkett and four others.

Almost 500 people were killed in the Rising, more than half were civilians. More than 2,600 were wounded during heavy British machine-gun fire, shelling and fires that left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

Ireland got its independence from Britain in 1922, amid much strife and bloodshed. But the Irish state has retained close ties with Britain and is the only European Union country that it shares a border with.

It is sad and ironic that Ireland is not only celebrating the start of the British exit from their country in 1916, but it is also concerned about the start of the British exit from the EU – Brexit — next year.

Kilkenny’s ‘Medieval Mile’

If you’ve ever been daunted by a walking tour of a medieval European city, say Prague, then Kilkenny’s “Medieval Mile” will delight you.

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The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 and named after the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. Photo/Linda Gasparello

“Good goods sometimes come in small parcels,” Colette Byrne, CEO of the Kilkenny County Council, told the Association of European Journalists.

Just a mile-long, circular walk in Kilkenny (Ireland’s capital in the Middle Ages), Byrne said, will take you past a number of its marvels, including the 13th-century St. Mary’s Church, whose graveyard has a rare and significant collection of tombs, and The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, for the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. The abbey is famous for its five-gabled, stained glass Rosary Window.

Along the mile, there are plenty of non-medieval buildings, notably the limestone Thosel Town Hall which dominates the High Street. Its name comes from two old English words “toll” meaning tax, and “sael” meaning hall. Built in 1761, it served as a custom house and guildhall – today, it’s where Kilkennians pay their taxes.

Across the street from the town hall, there is the Hole in the Wall: a tiny tavern in the inner house of a Tudor mansion built in 1582, and Ireland’s oldest surviving townhouse. Around 1660, in order to gain access from the High Street to the rear of the inner house, a hole was punctured in a wall.

“It was a favored haunt of Captain Arthur Wesley, who was stationed at Kilkenny barracks before being seconded to the British army in Spain and India, and eventually becoming the Duke of Wellington and British prime minister. Later it developed a reputation of ill renown due to duels, arguments, highwaymen, etc., and this led to its eventual demise,” a Hole in the Wall brochure says.

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Standing in front of a pair of ghoulish murals, a visitor asks a local woman for directions to the High Street. Photo/Linda Gasparello

On St. Kiernan Street, behind the High Street on the circular walk, there is an inn with a notorious past: Kyteler’s. Ireland’s only witch trials took place in Kilkenny in 1324 – supposedly, they were Europe’s first witchcraft trials. Dame Alice Kyteler, an innkeeper and moneylender, was accused of using poison and sorcery against her four husbands, having amassed a fortune from them. Before she could be tried, Alice pulled strings and fled to England, but her maid was flogged and burned at the stake.

Down the street from Kyteler’s, there is long mural, commissioned by the Keep Kilkenny Beautiful Committee in 2013, with ghoulish images: ghosts, black cats with bared teeth, and a warning that “witches are amongst us.” Behind it, another is in the works: a blue-faced woman in a white dress, lying on her back, either asleep or dead. This mural seems to float above the one in front of it.

Kilkenny is a haven for muralists. Cast your eyes up on the High Street, and you’ll see a cheery pink wall of the Smithwick’s Brewery. Cast them down, on a corner of Friary Street, and you’ll see a black cat with a curled tail, waiting to cross your path.

On all our trips to Ireland over the years, Llewellyn and I don’t know how we missed this magical little city.

→ See more photos from Kilkenny in our photo gallery here.

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A man pushes a stroller down the High Street, as a painted black cat waits to cross their path on the corner. Photo/Linda Gasparello

‘American’ Middle East Universities in Danger

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By Linda Gasparello

The attack on the American University of Kabul opens a new chapter on impeding access to liberal education in Afghanistan. It is a chapter that could be opened in as many as 18 American universities across the Middle East and North Africa.

The American University, located on five acres in the Afghan capital, opened in 2006. It is the only private, not-for-profit and co-educational university in the war-devastated country. It offers its 1,700 full- and part-time students a liberal arts and sciences curriculum taught in English. Many receive U.S. government-funded scholarships.

In 2008 then-first lady Laura Bush — who made access to education in Afghanistan one of her causes — helped to secure $42 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development for the American University. The State Department reportedly considers it to be an important symbol of the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan, and it has educated many Afghan government and non-government group officials who are trying to build a modern country.

Other American universities in the Middle East and North Africa – between nine and 18 – that receive U.S. government support also promote critical thinking and a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. The oldest of these, the American University in Beirut, has been doing so since its founding by American missionaries in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College. Its mission statement says, “The university believes deeply in and encourages freedom of thought and expression and seeks to foster tolerance and respect for diversity and dialogue.”

As Michelle Evans, student life coordinator at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the second-oldest American-brand institution in the Middle East, told U.S. News & World Report, “The mission and values of an American university is to cultivate a well-rounded, independent thinker who is ready for the challenges of the world.”

As a graduate student on a U.S. government-funded scholarship to AUC in the late 1970s, I saw how important it was to have such an institution in a country that was trying to modernize. AUC students were exposed to so many more courses and ideas than students at the national universities, including Cairo University, who took classes only within their discipline. I felt they would be the most ready and able to carry out the “opening up” (or infitah) to the West that President Anwar Sadat was beginning in 1977.

Remarkably, as strongholds of Western education and values, AUC and other universities did not suffer lethal attacks during the civil wars in Lebanon, Arab anger at President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the Arab Spring. But there have been attacks on them, and I experienced one at AUC in 1977.

On a January afternoon, I was enjoying coffee with friends in the interior garden of the university when we heard a faculty member shout,“There’s a riot outside. Go home! Go home now!” Rioters pelted the university with stones, breaking windows. The stoning stunned everyone because the university — and America — was held in such high esteem in Egypt. The school’s librarian, a well-born Egyptian matron, said to me, “Who would do such a thing?”

We soon learned just who.

Thousands of poor Egyptians took to the streets in anger over Sadat’s economic liberalization, specifically a government decree lifting price controls on bread and other basic necessities, acceding to an International Monetary Fund request. The countrywide Bread Riots lasted for two days, and rioters destroyed 120 buses and hundreds of buildings in Cairo alone. But the American University was spared.

The Bread Riot protesters threw rocks; today’s Islamists, motivated by ideology, will toss bombs.

The attack on the American University of Kabul was a seminal event. Now the venerated American universities in the Middle East and North Africa will be even more vulnerable than they already are. — For InsideSources