One feature of my blog will be to offer reviews from time to time of current live and/or other dramatic performances that may be relevant. Today's example is a play Mariah & I saw last evening. Palmer Park is a play by Canadian playwright Joanna Glass about the Palmer Park neighborhood of Detroit in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 race riots there. The play elucidates the struggle by white and black neighbors to maintain the racial and social harmony they've fought to achieve in their back yard, at the nexus of racial integration and tension in the '60s. In its numerous revelatory passages between both races, Palmer Park reflects white and black ambivalence about a great social experiment that, sadly, seems to have failed, at least in Detroit. And possibly elsewhere in America. As the play brings out, we're a more segregated country now than when Dr. Martin Luther King jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech.
Palmer Park is a play well worth seeing, regardless of race, social standing or class identification.
In a side note, and in immediate relevance to the racial divisiveness that a social issue can provide, let me comment on the latest from DC. Threatening to cut off social services to poor people if the city council goes forward with same-sex marriage rights, the Church shows an appalling lack of courage to the very social issue it claims to favor. The Church has an obligation when accepting public funds to provide services that have at least the intention of longevity. Those in need of food and shelter deserve the comfort, especially with winter approaching, of being able to depend on the warmth and sustenance those services offer. To inject the irrational element of homophobia into the equation is not only shocking, it is a sin, something the Church seems to have forgotten the meaning of. It's time to separate church and state at all levels. This is another excellent reason to do that.
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