Two new stories for AOL’s recently launched City’s Best. The first one is on the Broadway revival of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones:
Daisy Werthan isn’t just stubborn. Stubborn would be manageable. No, Daisy is irascible and obstreperous! Sure she looks benign, maybe sweet, to those on the outside. Who those people are, though, we never learn. We never see them.
What we see instead is Daisy’s aggravated son Boolie, pleading with his mother to realize that she can’t drive anymore and that she needs help getting around. It’s the late ’40s — and now the set-up for Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” is complete.
To read the rest, click here.
The second one is on Anna Ziegler’s play Photograph 51, running at Ensemble Studio Theatre:
Maybe the sense of injustice in playwright Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51” is moot. On the one hand, discovering the DNA double-helix structure was a powerful event, one that shaped 50 years of science and medicine. It was largely why James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize in 1962.
But the back story is thorny. We know their colleague Rosalind Franklin captured the first image of the structure of DNA in her famous “Photograph 51.” Did three men win a Nobel by dint of one woman? And since the Nobel Prize can’t be bestowed posthumously — and since Franklin died in 1958 — does it matter?
To read the rest, click here.
