Book & Cinematic Reviews

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The American Conservatory Theatre: Dead Metaphor

A.C.T. Presents the World Premiere of George F. Walker's Hilarious Political Comedy
Dead Metaphor
February 28 to March 24, 2013

Directed by Irene Lewis, this dark comedy--from one of Canada's most acclaimed playwrights--satirizes the hypocrisies and politics of postwar living

A soldier returns from the Middle East to find work in this audacious and hilarious dark comedy

SAN FRANCISCO (January 15, 2013)—American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) welcomes the . . . world premiere of Dead Metaphor —George F. Walker’s dark comedy that satirizes the hypocrisies and politics of postwar living. When Dean returns home from the war in the Middle East and hits the job market, he discovers that his superior military skills don’t get him very far in the business world. His readjustment to non-bunker life begins by moving in with his aging parents and pregnant ex-(and soon-to-be current) wife. When he is offered a job as poster boy for a crusading politician on her own mission for “truth and justice,” his military ethics collide with the unscrupulous world of national political campaigns—and he discovers that his unique skill set may be his best asset after all. 

Says A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff: “I read Dead Metaphor all in one sitting—the first scene made me laugh out loud, the second scene was a shocker, and by the third scene I was totally hooked. In the spirit of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, George Walker has an incredible knack for mining dark humor out of impossible circumstances, deploying a kind of vivid satire to make us listen to our own clichés and become aware of our own hypocrisy. And I can think of no one better than Irene Lewis, who staged a brilliant production of David Mamet’s Race for us last season, to bring to life this world premiere by a major Canadian writer. A.C.T. audiences are in for an outrageous ride and a vivid glimpse at the underbelly of modern life and contemporary politics.”

Dan Rubin writes in the program about his conversation with the Playwright, George F. Walker:

In 1971, George F. Walker was a 23-year-old taxi driver from Toronto’s working-class East End. While carting fares around the city, he saw a Factory Theatre Lab poster calling for play submissions by Canadian Playwrights—part of founding artistic director Ken Gass’s visionary “Canadian Only” policy, one of the sparks of Toronto’s theater movement in the 1970s

Walker had been scribbling poems and short stories since high school. Friends from the neighborhood had always said he would become a writer Local writing groups were closed to a working-class kid, however. They were reserved for University of Toronto graduates. And Walker had no idea how approach publishers. Theater in Toronto, on the other hand, “was just getting started,” he remembers, “and they’d take anyone.”

So Walker wrote his first play, The Prince of Naples, and submitted it. A week later, he learned that it would receive a production. On the first day of rehearsal, Walker saw director Paul Bettis’ copy of the script. On it, dramaturg John Palme had written a note: “This guy is a genuine subversive. We’ve got to produce him.”

Where the title of Dead Metaphor came from, Walker explains. There used to be a time when we didn’t send soldiers off to fight wars and then forget entirely about them, like they weren’t even part of our society. Less than one percent of both our populations has anything to do with them. So something that used to mean something—soldiers fighting for their country—is now irrelevant. It is a dead thing. We don’t even know where they are. Off they go and then they come back into our world, many of them in trouble, messed up and with nowhere to go. They come back and they only get noticed when they’re in trouble. And we’re in trouble too.

A.C.T.’s 2012–13 season also features the world premiere music theater event Stuck Elevator (April 4–28), the Bay Area premiere of The National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed production of Black Watch (May 9–June 9), and a new production of Tom Stoppard’s ravishing masterwork Arcadia (May 16–June 9).

This play review is found at http://www.act-sf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=events_conservatory

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Book & Cinematic Reviews

Previous Issue

The Children Of Men by WILLIAM MCGURN, WSJ

By Jonathan V. Last (Encounter, 320 pages, $23.99)

For decades we've been warned about the dangers of overpopulation.
The real threat to our future, argues Jonathan V. Last, is that we are not having enough babies.

Among the children of progress it is commonly supposed that while liberal policy is guided solely by data, facts and the objectively verifiable, their opponents' minds are darkened by irrational allegiances and authorities (guns and religion, anyone?). Barack Obama gave voice to this conceit in his first inaugural when he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Never mind that American liberalism is not without its own pieties, orthodoxies and apocalyptic tropes. 

None has been more powerful than the fear of overpopulation. Even before Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best seller, "The Population Bomb," our enlightened classes have been telling us that growing populations are bad—bad for women, bad for the economy, bad for the environment. Now comes Jonathan Last to tell us that they got it all wrong: The real threat to our future, says Mr. Last, is that we are not having enough babies.

His argument in "What to Expect When No One's Expecting" is summed up in three broad propositions. First, that "there is something about modernity itself that tends toward fewer children." Second, that most attempts to reverse this trend have failed. And third, that unless something changes soon, the United States will face what Japan and Europe are already seeing: shrinking, graying populations that will affect everything from armies and real-estate prices to entitlements and entrepreneurship.

From today's vantage point, it is hard to recall the fevered advance of the gospel of overpopulation, or the way it fixed itself in the firmament of institutions like the World Bank. In poor Eastern nations such as China and India, Western pieties about keeping families small became official policy. Only very recently has progressive America even acknowledged the inevitable abuses that came with it (involuntary sterilization and forced abortion, to name but two). . .

Why should we care? For one thing, declining fertility rates threaten entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare as more retirees come to be supported by fewer workers. (Mr. Last tartly notes that these programs were "conceived in an era of high fertility.") An older America would also likely have a harder time projecting military power without the large numbers of young people that such a commitment requires—or the tax base to pay for it. Creativity and innovation could be affected as well. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker put it in The Wall Street Journal in 2006: "The vast majority of important new ideas come from inventors and scientists who are younger than age 50, often far younger." . . .

Read the entire book review at the WSJ  . . .

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Book & Cinematic Reviews

Past Issue

Questioning the Obesity Paradigm by Deborah Donlon, MD

Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, by Gary Taubes, 272 pages, Knopf.

As physicians, we think we know what causes obesity. Eating too much. Exercising too little. Sedentary jobs and leisure activities. Soda, chips, channel surfing and junk-food advertising. We counsel our patients to eat less and move more. I confess I am skeptical when an obese patient tells me she “eats tiny portions” and “exercises all the time.” Based on what I learned in medical school about calories consumed versus calories expended, this just can’t be true. 

Or can it? In his book, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, Gary Taubes argues against the prevailing wisdom about what causes people to gain weight. Over 10 years ago, bestselling author Taubes found that he continued to gain weight despite exercising regularly and restricting both caloric intake and fat consumption. As a self-identified carnivore, he started himself on an Atkins-like diet consisting of animal protein, healthy fats and vegetables--and lost 20 pounds in six weeks. He has maintained his weight loss by staying on the diet, and has spent the past decade researching the connection between specific foods we eat and their effect on our weight. (He is also the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, a highly technical tome less accessible to the lay public than his current book.)

In Why We Get Fat, Taubes challenges widely held beliefs. For example, we tend to think that obesity is caused by affluence and abundance, or having “too much of a good thing.” We think that wealth, including the ability to buy machines to do work for us and transport us, is what is making us fat. Taubes turns this belief around by highlighting the historical connection between obesity and poverty. The Pima Indians became increasingly obese during a period of economic decline and famine. The poorest Americans during the Great Depression were those most likely to be obese. Today, people who live in poverty and are employed in physically demanding jobs have a high rate of obesity, as well as malnutrition. Under Taubes’ examination, the paradigm connecting obesity to too much food and too little activity begins to weaken.

Taubes follows his history lessons with two fairly discouraging chapters titled “The elusive benefits of undereating” and “The elusive benefits of exercise.” Prior to the 1970s, he observes, low-calorie diets were referred to as “semi-starvation diets,” the idea being that people would have great difficulty following such a regimen for a couple of months, let alone permanently. Well-controlled studies, according to Taubes, have failed to show a connection between calorie restriction and sustained weight loss. And vigorous exercise, while having numerous health benefits, leads to hunger and increased caloric intake. This fact limits the utility of exercise as a weight-loss strategy. Nonetheless, despite the lack of evidence for calorie restriction and exercise, the multibillion-dollar diet industry continues to promote these behavior changes for weight loss—and profits from our failures.

For Taubes, “why we get fat” turns out to be a complex interplay between genetics, diet and lipid metabolism. Those looking for a crash course in thermodynamics will be pleased to find one in his book. Basically, the more fat cells we have in our bodies, the more those fat cells drive us to eat, and the more energy they rob from other cellular functions in the body. “What to do about it” requires identifying a villain that we should avoid in our diets. Taubes’ villain is the carbohydrate, which drives insulin secretion, which drives energy storage in fat cells. According to Taubes, the more carbohydrates we consume, the more we crave, and the fatter we become. The same carbohydrates zap our energy and leave us unmotivated to exercise. So, our fat cells from excess carbohydrate intake turn us into couch potatoes, rather than the other way around. The last chapter of Taubes’ book offers a nutritional program in which carbohydrates are essentially eliminated in favor of animal protein, vegetables and fats.

In the arena of weight-loss research, every argument has a counter-argument. One of those taking a contrary view to Taubes is local physician Dr. John McDougall, whose new book The Starch Solution will be published in May. According to McDougall, animal products are what should be limited in the American diet. He recommends a low-fat, vegan diet that includes liberal quantities of starches such as rice, beans and potatoes.

Let’s return to our obese patients . . . Read the entire review at Sonoma Medicine . .  .

Dr. Donlon, a Santa Rosa family physician, chairs the SCMA Editorial Board.

Email: DonlonD@sutterhealth.org

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