Off Broadway: poorpalestinians are good entertainment?

A new play opened last night at the New York Theater Workshop. If you don't get enough poorpalestinian Arabs by day, now you can enjoy a "panel of embittered, suffering or enraged Arab women" in the evening. For entertainment. And pay for the privilege.

The "theatre review" in today's New York Times calls this new play - The Black Eyed - "thoughtful but rambling" and likens it to the ABC television show, "The View." Need I say more?

(Yes, absolutely.)

The Workshop website touts the play thusly:

"... this shockingly funny play skewers traditional views on sex, family, and terrorism."

Sounds like loads of fun.

If you act quickly and are really lucky, maybe you can get tickets to these "two special post-performance programs."

Thursday, August 2: Post-performance conversation with The Black Eyed playwright Betty Shamieh and Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly and the recent revival of Flower Drum Song), who will discuss their experiences as pioneering playwrights of color.

Thursday, August 9: Post-performance conversation with Betty Shamieh, Dalia Basiouny, an Egyptian theatre artist, academic, and translator, and Hala Nassar, Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Culture and Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. They will discuss the Arab and feminist themes of The Black Eyed.

It's really too bad the KGB (Kahlil Gibran - Brooklyn) madrassa isn't up and running yet; this would make a great field trip for the kids.

And guess what? Free tickets can be had through the Community Access and Education Initiatives -- funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others.

So in addition to financing an Arabic-language-and-culture "public school," New Yorkers get to pay for students, senior citizens and various others from "social service organizations and community centers" to see "a torrent of angry neuroticism," "a caffeinated rush of bruised feelings and thorny resentment," "a wild-eyed pitch of outrage" and a "stream of angry harangues."

If you read to the end of the review, you find that the reviewer found it all ever so... enervating.

Long before its 90 minutes have concluded you may be wishing for a commercial break...

Now if that doesn't appeal, you can always go to the movies instead. Today's Times also reviews a "no-frills documentary" called Out of Status, which examines the Plight of Muslim Immigrants in Post-Sept. 11 America:

.... Filled with moving accounts of detentions and interrogations, “Out of Status” is long on empathy but frustratingly short on specifics. The emphasis on emotion over fact is bolstered by a 2004 interview with the pompous Jan Ting, a former I.N.S. deputy commissioner who served under President George H. W. Bush and who appears smugly unaware of any encroachment on civil liberties by his former office. He’s a camera-ready villain.

Rough in technique but worthy in intention, “Out of Status” listens to those whose voices are seldom heard. We need to hear more.

If you're looking for a break from the Dhimmitude, you can always fall back on good ol' fashioned Bush-bashing. No End in Sight, about the war in Iraq, also opens today in Manhattan and is likewise reviewed in today's Times:

... It might be argued that since Mr. Bremer, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz declined to appear in the film, Mr. Ferguson was able to present only one side of the story. But the accumulated professional standing of the people he did interview, and their calm, detailed insistence on the facts, makes such an objection implausible. So too does the corroboration of the journalists who watched the story unfold and, perhaps most of all, the sense that anyone but the hardiest Bush loyalist will feel of having seen versions of this story before.

That feeling does not make “No End in Sight” dull or easy to watch. Quite the contrary. It’s a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.

Absolutely vital? I guess I'm not up to the New York City arts scene anymore, because I find just reading about it absolutely... enervating.

If I have some extra time on my hands maybe I'll see the Harry Potter movie again, but I don't want to get any closer to "the arts" than that. Either I'm getting old, or my intentions are just not as "worthy" as they used to be.