Fr. Gregory Boyle’s book includes stories of young parents who have figured out how to manage jobs and child care, and enjoy their kids even if the parents themselves didn’t have much of a childhood.
“We’re at a crucial historical juncture, where literally the fate of the planet hangs by a thread,” says rocker Tom Morello. “We are musicians, so our message is in the mosh pit.”
Playwright Michael John Garcés’ labyrinthine plot follows two sisters through a myriad of fantastical scenarios involving a mega-corporation that aims to control worldwide food production.
Structured as a radio play, Pang! is made up of three stories of struggle and survival distilled from real-life accounts of impoverished families, including one from Los Angeles.
Inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1934 classic play, Yerma, this one-act by Oliver Mayer is set in contemporary Los Angeles where Yerma (Jean Murillo) labors as part of a janitorial team at an elite university.
And Then They Came For Us is not the first film to tell the story of Executive Order 9066. Rarely, however, has any account of this shameful history been presented with such persuasively contemporary urgency.
Christopher Chen’s play is partly inspired by the real-life controversy surrounding playwright/performer Mike Daisey’s 2011 solo piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
A photographic exhibit reveals long-unseen images of the Chicano community at a time of political upheaval and demands for civil rights.
Playwright Josefina López appropriates the basic construct of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, tosses in large dollops of magical realism and transforms the lead character from a 19th-century Norwegian doctor into a 21st-century Mexican curandera.
Co-published by The American Prospect
Kikito, an enormous photograph of a 1-year-old child, pasted onto plywood sheets, stands 65 feet high on Mexico’s side of the border. Viewed from the U.S., he is a giant black-and-white toddler, his chubby hands appearing to grip the top of the border wall as he looks over it, into the mysterious United States.
A new historical play looks at a disputed tract of land that would eventually become Watts.
This illuminating stage work about Dick Gregory, the late iconic comedian and civil rights activist, receives a powerhouse performance from Joe Morton as the stand-up comic.
A new drama speaks not only to issues of criminal justice, but to the inner turmoil many of us wrestle with every day.
Blade Runner 2049 not only replicates many of the original film’s great qualities, but soars on its own as a stunning modern cinematic achievement.
Ball culture, the subject of the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, is the backdrop for Filipino-American playwright Boni B. Alvarez’s new play, Fixed
Runaway Home should pack more of a punch than it does. The production has rich and satisfying sequences, most of them generated from the supporting ensemble. Whatever its shortcomings, the play is almost too timely for comfort. Storms batter our coasts while climate deniers reign.
Playwright Stephanie Alison Walker was among the thousands of homeowners to receive a foreclosure notice in 2008. The experience prompted her to write American Home, a textured melodrama centered on a young couple whose lives come apart once they start to lose the house they love.
Dolores, a documentary mix of archival footage and interviews with Dolores Huerta, her family and such prominent figures as Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis and Luis Valdez, portrays the United Farm Workers co-founder as a pivotal yet relatively uncredited luminary in labor history.
For Dick Gregory, American racism was a senseless fact of life: “I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.”
There is no shortage of social and political content for viewers to stream online. Here are some of the best new films released so far this year addressing social and political themes, in time for late-summer viewing.