My apologies for the late augmenter post. Hope you enjoy it. The authors of the convener post on Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague presented us with very interesting questions. They first explain how there’s “a variety of responses to the plague…displayed in [the] play.” And they note that there’s a spread of “emotional responses […]
Read More →A final convener’s post: thank you, Bryan
For almost ten years, Bryan Waterman has been an integral—dare we say—core part of the NYUAD community. He has shaped an entire generation of students and community members with his spirit, empathy, and leadership. Although he will continue to impact this campus from afar, we wanted to take a moment and celebrate his time in […]
Read More →‘Not Just an AIDS Play’
It’s interesting to see how a play that looks at the AIDS epidemic at a time when not many were willing to talk about it keeps getting reproduced to this date. Why is that so? According to Gary Abrahams, director of a 2017 production of Angels in America, the play goes beyond just talking about […]
Read More →“Aren’t you courageous? What a hero!” – Stolen years of the wife of a closeted gay husband
“I get angry because everyone’s said to him how fantastic, aren’t you courageous, what a hero,” writes Beth. “I wanted to beat the living shit out of him for what he did to our family. There were no repercussions for him. My anger was mind-blowing.” Beth, an Australian woman whose husband came out On the […]
Read More →When AIDS Was Funny
Angels in America takes us back to the AIDS pandemic in America. The play is set in 1985, 4 years after the epidemic first started and 2 years before President Reagan publicly addressed the epidemic by its name (see here for a detailed timeline of HIV/AIDS in America compiled by New York City AIDS Memorial). […]
Read More →The Blessing Angel
In the final Epilogue, Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah sat on the rim of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. That was one of the most memorable shots in the HBO series for me. These four characters sit under the giant statues of an angel, surrounded by the wings of the angel. This angel is […]
Read More →Fallen Angels
Angels in America consists of two plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The two plays are based on the very real AIDS epidemic that ravaged the United States during Reagan era America. Millennium Approaches focuses on three sub-stories interconnected in their own way—the love shared by Louis and Prior, which is cut short by Prior contracting […]
Read More →The Blame Game, Hillbrow.
In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the author is highly critical of the treatment of foreigners/immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa. Right off the bat, readers are given a sense of how grave the hatred or bias against immigrants in Hillbrow is. I decided to do some research of my own and see how during COVID-19, the […]
Read More →Censorship, and The Bible
After writing Dream of Ding Village, and with the recent rise in the book’s popularity, Yan Lianke has given several interviews to provide more insight into the book and into his writing in general, and several articles about him have been written. One of these articles written in 2006—the year the book was published—especially interested me. The article focuses […]
Read More →Violence in our Language
Welcome to our Hillbrow… Welcome to our Hillbrow, the land where crime, prostitution, and violence prevails, the land where laws do not bind its people. Throughout the novel, we observed multiple cases where violence takes place in Hillbrow, from a seven years old child getting hit by a car to hearing gunshots ringing in the […]
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