A review of Court Theatre's production 03.12.25 and the broader mirror of the relationships between the theatre, the university, the neighborhood, the author, politics, and Americanness
Ha ha! One thing I've learnt from being here is how very ‘different’ American culture is! It's been an exciting discovery for me to get to know real Americans 😂. You, of course, have extra layers of culture my friend!! That makes you even more interesting ❤️❤️
Aw, April! What a lovely thing to say! I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the Brits myself, with a large dose of respect for your defiant haiku-writing eerie photo-capturing witty self. ❤️
Wonderful, thank you from the bottom of my heart ❤️ I am just about back on my feet and building the confidence to get back out into the world and start writing again. One step at a time!!!
I love how comedy and drama can send a message that normally would be dismissed by the people.
It's not unlike the court jester that was allowed to tell the truth in front of the king, as long as it was "funny".
I've recently been rewatching the later Battlestar Galactica and it feels like an alternate universe where things happened a bit differently, especially technologically. But where it's the same is in matters of the heart! 💜
We are all passengers on a spaceship called Earth. Let's work together and fix things and frak the idiots, morons, and psychos from society, just like native tribes do.
Ditto on Neshma's 'I love the way you write,' Tonika. And a deeper connection I'm perceiving between you two as people within the arts world of big cities, with one foot into 'progressive liberalism' and one foot as a permanent outsider to any movement. The latter two describe me also.
I think I read Raisin before I saw it, possibly in eighth grade because I was insufferable like that and read all of Shakespeare and adopted the cynical tone of Oscar Wilde. Insufferable.
Now I have to examine it through an entirely different lens. In HS I did a research paper on the Black Panthers, finding out that black communities had a higher quality of education before they were forced to assimilate. Integration made them second-class citizens rather than leaders of a proud and self-reliant community.
And, as you allude, this is now being turned against them with white academia getting grants to buy up their best houses.
Yesterday I was reading about the connection between Rothschild and Marx, who descended from two sisters. Marx came from a long line of Talmudic scholars. Fadi Lama has applied a Koranic methodology to studying the Zion Protocols. Two quotes are these:
"We have set one against another the personal and national reckonings of the Goyim, religious and race hatreds, which we have fostered into a huge growth in the course of the past twenty centuries. ... We must search out in the very finest shades of expression and the knotty points of the lexicon of law justification for those cases where we shall have to pronounce judgments that might appear abnormally audacious and unjust, for it is important that these resolutions should be set forth in expressions that shall seem to be the most exalted moral principles cast into legal form."
And isn't that what happened? Any community protecting its own cultural integrity and the welfare of its own was branded racist and bigoted. And we were given sympathetic faces, not the predators who figured out a way to profit (like Lorraine's father from his own era.)
I'm recording an episode later today on Shanghaied Cities: preparing for the asian invasion. The purpose of the 15-min cities--15 to 30 story buildings of 800 sq' apts for $3K/mo. with no parking--is for the wealthy elite of China. No one here wants to live like that. And it's cries of 'racism' that will drown out any protest, just as the case against Harvard's affirmative action quotas was brought and won by Chinese students.
What's the answer? I've nicknamed my caret plan 'Gentrify in Place.' We should all be landed gentry, yes? We should be putting down roots in intergenerational neighborhoods, where every improvement benefits us all. The belief that white people are inherently racist is a lie, 'be-a-lie."
Diversity is a joy, not an obligation. Every family is a culture to protect. And the first transients I'd deport are those college students, along with the predatory university system. You don't need them to put on plays! Write something new (I'm talking to you, Mary) and put it on yourself. RitS is even older than I am, it's time for some new grapes without wrath ;-)
Whoa! First off, I can only imagine a Tereza going into puberty armed with the lexicon of Wilde and Shakespeare. 😂 I don’t meet kids like that ever. I wish. And I’m surrounded by kids every day.
Question regarding the protocols: do you think they’re real? As in authentic? I find the theory that they were fed into the public as if they were really penned by Jewish folk but weren’t compelling. I believe they were trying to turn Nicholas II and the Russians sentiments against the Jews so they penned the protocols. Of course now I can’t remember where that research came from. Possibly Ehret.
Isn’t it funny how black families had a great thing going on, had businesses, had houses, communities… and then they were “saved” and “integrated” and all went down hill. When you looked into the Black Panthers, did you think they were infiltrated or bad seeded from the start?
You know, I tend to go extra hard on theatre in Chicago. I’m still so damn disappointed how hard they went into the Covid scam and how they turned into good little Stasi asking for papers at the doors. I agree that some literature is old and if you’re gonna put up a play, you always have to answer the question “why do this right now?” And I fear the answer for this production was “so we can launder the university’s image.”
Indeed, diversity is a joy and not an obligation, well said. I have to recognize that I, myself, am quite assimilated and (as much as I criticize) I do root for America and for its people. But America, at home, lack coherent ethos. It’s like a big high school with different cliques sitting at their own tables either sneering others or secretly wishing they could be at their tables.
I like your metaphor at the end. I’m sure Mary would approve too.
Thanks, Tonika. I was definitely a weird kid--not what you're saying but I had something to prove. I also wrote an epic poem in the style of the Iliad, just to add more weirdness.
On the protocols, what's compelling is their match to what's happened. It's not as if they're saying 'we're going to drink baby's blood by the full moon.' They give point-by-point directives for how entire populations can be manipulated, like Machiavelli taken to a societal level.
It's not really rocket science. If you or I wanted to figure out how a small group could covertly control the masses, we could come up with something similar. In fact, if someone simply observed the methods and retroactively inferred the rules, it would be similar.
Julius is the best one to ask about the role of the Bolsheviks in Russia. (And he also has considerable evidence of Ehret promoting known falsehoods and not answering Julius' direct challenges that cite his research.) I was just reading a fact-check of Europa on the Judeo-Bolsheviks, which included:
"Jewish-Swedish banker Olof Aschberg funded the Bolsheviks; his grandson is a former communist and anti-White activist today (26:57)
"True.
"Jewish chairman of the executive committee Jacob Sverdlov ordered Jewish Cheka commander Jacob Yurovsky to kill the Tsar’s family under orders from Jacob Schiff (27:35)
"Yurovsky and Sverdlov were both Jews, Yurovsky was in charge of the murders of the Romanov family, and Sverdlov played a major role in organising it alongside Lenin and Filipp Goloshchyokin. But there is no source that suggests Yurovsky ordered this to appease Jacob Schiff."
I don't know the answer to your question about the Black Panthers. My feeling is that, if we started with everyone belonging somewhere--permanently in the place where they were born or wherever they've been a long-term resident now--we wouldn't need to worry about integration or gentrification. We could create homes where we are, and those who choose to travel and live other places after that would do so out of a position of strength and love and curiosity. Curio-city.
“People born here for generations, considered Apple Pie American, would sometimes get their 23andme results and suddenly adopt a symbolic ethnic minority identity.” Ha. I mean people need to collect their brownie points right? Lotsa good observations in your essay/review, Tonika. (Reminds me of a play I saw here last year… would have perhaps enjoyed it more 5 years ago when I was less aware that certain messages are amplified via arts funding). Plus I keep forgetting to tell you that I love the way you write. 💕
High praise, coming from you! Thanks, SF! “Collect their brownie points” 👀 😂
I don’t know about the culture in Frisco, but Chicago is suffering from a lack of patronage and I think a lot has to do with this inauthentic brownie point collection.
Excellent writing! And intelligence that is easy to take in, while being instructive and artistic, all at once. Cheers!
Thanks Word Herder!
You are very good at this review stuff! I love that you put in all the context for the uneducated amongst us! Beautifully written, well done
“Uneducated!” Pfft! Besides, art doesn’t need an education.
Ha ha! One thing I've learnt from being here is how very ‘different’ American culture is! It's been an exciting discovery for me to get to know real Americans 😂. You, of course, have extra layers of culture my friend!! That makes you even more interesting ❤️❤️
Aw, April! What a lovely thing to say! I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the Brits myself, with a large dose of respect for your defiant haiku-writing eerie photo-capturing witty self. ❤️
Wonderful, thank you from the bottom of my heart ❤️ I am just about back on my feet and building the confidence to get back out into the world and start writing again. One step at a time!!!
🙌 I believe in you!
I love how comedy and drama can send a message that normally would be dismissed by the people.
It's not unlike the court jester that was allowed to tell the truth in front of the king, as long as it was "funny".
I've recently been rewatching the later Battlestar Galactica and it feels like an alternate universe where things happened a bit differently, especially technologically. But where it's the same is in matters of the heart! 💜
We are all passengers on a spaceship called Earth. Let's work together and fix things and frak the idiots, morons, and psychos from society, just like native tribes do.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/alphabet-vs-the-goddess
It would serve us all to take ourselves a little less seriously too.
"shields down" yes yes, I've recently done this with my family..... If it can happen for families it can happen everywhere.
Turn key utopia
🤞
Ditto on Neshma's 'I love the way you write,' Tonika. And a deeper connection I'm perceiving between you two as people within the arts world of big cities, with one foot into 'progressive liberalism' and one foot as a permanent outsider to any movement. The latter two describe me also.
I think I read Raisin before I saw it, possibly in eighth grade because I was insufferable like that and read all of Shakespeare and adopted the cynical tone of Oscar Wilde. Insufferable.
Now I have to examine it through an entirely different lens. In HS I did a research paper on the Black Panthers, finding out that black communities had a higher quality of education before they were forced to assimilate. Integration made them second-class citizens rather than leaders of a proud and self-reliant community.
And, as you allude, this is now being turned against them with white academia getting grants to buy up their best houses.
Yesterday I was reading about the connection between Rothschild and Marx, who descended from two sisters. Marx came from a long line of Talmudic scholars. Fadi Lama has applied a Koranic methodology to studying the Zion Protocols. Two quotes are these:
"We have set one against another the personal and national reckonings of the Goyim, religious and race hatreds, which we have fostered into a huge growth in the course of the past twenty centuries. ... We must search out in the very finest shades of expression and the knotty points of the lexicon of law justification for those cases where we shall have to pronounce judgments that might appear abnormally audacious and unjust, for it is important that these resolutions should be set forth in expressions that shall seem to be the most exalted moral principles cast into legal form."
And isn't that what happened? Any community protecting its own cultural integrity and the welfare of its own was branded racist and bigoted. And we were given sympathetic faces, not the predators who figured out a way to profit (like Lorraine's father from his own era.)
I'm recording an episode later today on Shanghaied Cities: preparing for the asian invasion. The purpose of the 15-min cities--15 to 30 story buildings of 800 sq' apts for $3K/mo. with no parking--is for the wealthy elite of China. No one here wants to live like that. And it's cries of 'racism' that will drown out any protest, just as the case against Harvard's affirmative action quotas was brought and won by Chinese students.
What's the answer? I've nicknamed my caret plan 'Gentrify in Place.' We should all be landed gentry, yes? We should be putting down roots in intergenerational neighborhoods, where every improvement benefits us all. The belief that white people are inherently racist is a lie, 'be-a-lie."
Diversity is a joy, not an obligation. Every family is a culture to protect. And the first transients I'd deport are those college students, along with the predatory university system. You don't need them to put on plays! Write something new (I'm talking to you, Mary) and put it on yourself. RitS is even older than I am, it's time for some new grapes without wrath ;-)
Whoa! First off, I can only imagine a Tereza going into puberty armed with the lexicon of Wilde and Shakespeare. 😂 I don’t meet kids like that ever. I wish. And I’m surrounded by kids every day.
Question regarding the protocols: do you think they’re real? As in authentic? I find the theory that they were fed into the public as if they were really penned by Jewish folk but weren’t compelling. I believe they were trying to turn Nicholas II and the Russians sentiments against the Jews so they penned the protocols. Of course now I can’t remember where that research came from. Possibly Ehret.
Isn’t it funny how black families had a great thing going on, had businesses, had houses, communities… and then they were “saved” and “integrated” and all went down hill. When you looked into the Black Panthers, did you think they were infiltrated or bad seeded from the start?
You know, I tend to go extra hard on theatre in Chicago. I’m still so damn disappointed how hard they went into the Covid scam and how they turned into good little Stasi asking for papers at the doors. I agree that some literature is old and if you’re gonna put up a play, you always have to answer the question “why do this right now?” And I fear the answer for this production was “so we can launder the university’s image.”
Indeed, diversity is a joy and not an obligation, well said. I have to recognize that I, myself, am quite assimilated and (as much as I criticize) I do root for America and for its people. But America, at home, lack coherent ethos. It’s like a big high school with different cliques sitting at their own tables either sneering others or secretly wishing they could be at their tables.
I like your metaphor at the end. I’m sure Mary would approve too.
Thanks, Tonika. I was definitely a weird kid--not what you're saying but I had something to prove. I also wrote an epic poem in the style of the Iliad, just to add more weirdness.
On the protocols, what's compelling is their match to what's happened. It's not as if they're saying 'we're going to drink baby's blood by the full moon.' They give point-by-point directives for how entire populations can be manipulated, like Machiavelli taken to a societal level.
It's not really rocket science. If you or I wanted to figure out how a small group could covertly control the masses, we could come up with something similar. In fact, if someone simply observed the methods and retroactively inferred the rules, it would be similar.
Julius is the best one to ask about the role of the Bolsheviks in Russia. (And he also has considerable evidence of Ehret promoting known falsehoods and not answering Julius' direct challenges that cite his research.) I was just reading a fact-check of Europa on the Judeo-Bolsheviks, which included:
"Jewish-Swedish banker Olof Aschberg funded the Bolsheviks; his grandson is a former communist and anti-White activist today (26:57)
"True.
"Jewish chairman of the executive committee Jacob Sverdlov ordered Jewish Cheka commander Jacob Yurovsky to kill the Tsar’s family under orders from Jacob Schiff (27:35)
"Yurovsky and Sverdlov were both Jews, Yurovsky was in charge of the murders of the Romanov family, and Sverdlov played a major role in organising it alongside Lenin and Filipp Goloshchyokin. But there is no source that suggests Yurovsky ordered this to appease Jacob Schiff."
In this episode I look at the Red Terror and its connections to the Ashkenazis (which is a more accurate term than Jews): https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/fiddler-on-the-truth.
I don't know the answer to your question about the Black Panthers. My feeling is that, if we started with everyone belonging somewhere--permanently in the place where they were born or wherever they've been a long-term resident now--we wouldn't need to worry about integration or gentrification. We could create homes where we are, and those who choose to travel and live other places after that would do so out of a position of strength and love and curiosity. Curio-city.
I haven't seen this play in a long time, and reading this excellent review brought it back to life!
“People born here for generations, considered Apple Pie American, would sometimes get their 23andme results and suddenly adopt a symbolic ethnic minority identity.” Ha. I mean people need to collect their brownie points right? Lotsa good observations in your essay/review, Tonika. (Reminds me of a play I saw here last year… would have perhaps enjoyed it more 5 years ago when I was less aware that certain messages are amplified via arts funding). Plus I keep forgetting to tell you that I love the way you write. 💕
High praise, coming from you! Thanks, SF! “Collect their brownie points” 👀 😂
I don’t know about the culture in Frisco, but Chicago is suffering from a lack of patronage and I think a lot has to do with this inauthentic brownie point collection.