March
28, 2003
Front-Page
News
@$&*!
Great News Suzan-Lori Parks '85 was profiled Sunday,
March 16, by the New York Times in the article "Tough-Minded
Playwright Chooses a Title Tough to Ignore." Parks, who
became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize
for drama last year for her play Topdog/Underdog, has
authored a new play with a title, incorporating a well-known obscenity,
which the Times, the CSJ, and, no doubt, other
publications are reluctant to print. … A is now being performed
at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City. Inspired in
part by Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the play,
according to the Times, set "in a dystopia of the
future, a former colony, is about an abortionist, Hester, portrayed
by S. Epatha Merkerson, who tries to win her imprisoned son's
freedom. The rapper Mos Def is cast as Monster, an escaped convict."
Read more about the play at www.publictheater.org. Parks is also
set to publish her first novel in May. "On May 6,"
the Times notes, "Random House will publish her
first novel, Getting Mother's Body, about a family's
quest to dig up the jewelry supposedly buried in the grave of
one of its members. The first printing is 100,000 copies."
Walking the Walk During the Interfaith Spring Walk for
Peace, a group of MHC students, faculty, and staff who walked
from the campus to Boston to demonstrate for peace, gained the
attention of several news organizations. Bob Paquette, news director
of WFCR, the NPR affiliate in western New England, interviewed
students Sarah Cutler '03 and Jackilynn Wood '05 before
their departure, while the Worcester Telegram & Gazette
and the Boston Globe caught up with the walkers
en route to Boston. "As President Bush broke off diplomatic
attempts to disarm Iraq and prepared for war, a line of women
quietly traversed the hills of central Massachusetts spreading
a message of nonviolence," staff writer Martin Luttrell
writes in "Peace Marchers Carry Their Message to Worcester,"
in the March 18 edition of the Telegram & Gazette. "Some
motorists honked and waved. Students on the Clark campus cheered
and yelled as the walkers filed into the student union building,
where they had lunch and rested before continuing on to Grafton,
to spend the night," Luttrell reports. On the eve of the
attack on Iraq, Globe writer Michael Paulson interviewed
Andrea Ayvazian, the College's dean of religious life, on
the challenge facing the American clergy: providing support for
a nation engaged in a war that was nearly unanimously opposed
by religious leaders. "Religiously inspired peace activists
say they will not change their cause," Paulson writes in
"A Mostly Antiwar Clergy Faces a New Public Role,"
published in the paper's March 20 edition. "The Rev.
Andrea Ayvazian, the dean of religious life at Mount Holyoke College,
has been leading a group walking from South Hadley to Boston to
protest for peace, and she said that prayers for peace will continue."
The walkers left campus on March 14, arriving in Boston one week
later.
counter
is
1,076
|
