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In a play commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater, Jules Feifferthe Pulitzer Prizewinning satirist, artist, author, and playwrightreturns to the stage with a story that, though set against a backdrop of 1950s Brooklyn, offers striking parallels to the present day. Jules Feiffers A Bad Friend evokes a time of intense contradiction: of innocence and paranoia, idealism
and disenchantment, suspicion and fierce, unexamined belief. At its center is Rose, a sixteen- year old girl struggling through the vicissitudes of adolescence in a family of Communists; she longs for love and acceptance, and instead gets nightly speeches on Stalin. Though the ideology of her time is largely incomprehensible to her, the ramifications of her emotional needs are both sociological and political, and Feiffers play turns on a chain of events with terrifying, unforeseen consequences, for which Rose is an unwitting catalyst. Through a childs perspective we encounter a world of shifting illusions, and seewithin a family, within the larger world of American lifethe bitter disappointment that ensues as veils begin to fall from peoples eyes and they discover the truth, and the horror, of what they have previously embraced.
We spoke with Jules Feiffer about the autobiographical origins of A Bad Friend, his multifaceted fifty-year career, and his views on the role of art and theater as a force for social change. We also sat down with Feiffer and his two longtime friends and colleaguesthe venerable artists Edward Sorel and David Levineto discuss the evolution of their lives as left-wing cartoonists. Pete Hamill, who is to millions of readers the voice of New York itself, contributes a magnificently insightful reflection on the city in times past and present, and the uncanny resemblance between the vanished world of Feiffers play and todays emerging political
climate. Author Vivian Gornick and Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin provide trenchant historical analyses of the Communist movement in America and its aftermath, and Village
Voice columnist J. Hoberman contributes an eye-opening piece on the Hollywood blacklist. Finally, the award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem offers a stirring meditation on the romance of the Brooklyn Promenade, a poignant reminder of the youthful hopes, and dreams, and sorrows with which generation after generation has contended, gazing outward toward this majestic city.
The Editors
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