Appomattox

by EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer Appomattox, a new play by Christopher Hampton and commissioned by the Guthrie Theater, presents two distinct snapshots of American history: April 1865, the end of the Civil War; and April 1965, after the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson and just before the passage of President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act. While these…

The Good Fight

By MIRA REINBERG There is nothing like the subject of women’s suffrage to remind us that society’s historical memory is exceedingly, perhaps alarmingly, short, and consequently that each battle for the recognition and institution of a fundamental human political right needs to be fought anew, in a Sisyphean enterprise of selecting the most efficient tactics.…