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Women have long been second-class citizens, but you’d have to admit that even by the world’s shameful standards, we’ve hit a new low in the United States. It’s not even the revelations of the #MeToo movement, the fallout from the Dobbs decision and the scandal of the Epstein files.
I’m talking about the last few weeks. First, we had the Cornell University gang rape case and now the Vivek Ramaswamy ad in which his opponent’s mother, Donna Arthur, accuses her daughter, Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, of being a liar. The infamous backstory to this is that Acton was raped by her stepfather, Cletus “Bud” Arthur, who was arrested and indicted on child rape charges.
Is faith a belief in something greater than yourself — God, for instance — or a kind of wishful thinking, a desperate hope that you will live in the hereafter and one day see those you loved and lost?
That’s the question at the heart of “Sea Wall,” a one-man play written by Simon Stephens for Andrew Scott, who performs it with breathtaking intensity at Off-Broadway’s Studio Seaview through Oct. 30.
In “Hamlet,” you have the makings of what the late Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom described in his “Hamlet: Poem Unlimited” (Riverside Books, 2003) as “the Hamlet complex, of which murderousness forms as large a component as does self-conscious theatricality. Or are the two components fused: Should we speak of murderous theatricalism?”
But what of us? Should we also speak of murderous theatricalism in an AI-fused Trumpian society that is all about communications and reality TV but lacks communication skill?