A Nation Downwind: A-bomb testing program's guinea pigs get a voice onstage

[Ian David]

A Nation Downwind: A-bomb testing program's guinea pigs get a voice onstage
by Robert C. Koehler | Oct 25 2007 - 9:38am |


"Please, dear God, don't let us have killed John Wayne." -- unidentified government official, 1980

Mary Dickson's new play, "Exposed," is a sacrament of grief and anger that doesn't stop at the edge of the stage or end with the actors' bows. Be careful. It gets under the skin and into the marrow, but that's the whole point.

When I saw it this past weekend in Salt Lake City, where its world-premiere run is sold out, the author and some of the real-life characters the play is based on joined the cast onstage afterward and engaged with the audience -- almost no one left, by the way, and those who did left crying -- in a fervid discussion of the subject matter: the 928 above- and below-ground nuclear blasts set off at the Nevada Test Site, near Las Vegas, between 1951 and 1992; the devastating effect these tests, many of them very dirty, had on the downwind population; and the government secrecy and lies, as it pursued the Cold War, that kept the public falsely reassured that the fallout that dusted the landscape afterward was perfectly harmless.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=2335964

Like I say, I couldn't tell when the play stopped, as art met life in this interchange and the personal stories of the audience members -- "I've had cancer seven times . . . three of my children died of cancer" -- mingled with the storyline of "Exposed."

More:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10643



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