“Soft Power” – the culture-bending, plot-twisting musical within a play currently running at The Public’s Newman Theater – challenges the notion that the only effective parameters of power are money, race, and sex. These constructs of “hard” power are the hallmarks of greed, systemic racism, and misogyny and, from Xue Xing’s (a sensitive and alluring Conrad Ricamora) point of view,…
When a speaker raises alternate views of a significant problem and seems at one point to take “one side” and then “the other side,” and then advocates for the purity of moral ambiguity – presenting profound rhetorical arguments for each of those points of view – the audience is left bombarded by what seems like conflicting ethos, pathos, and logos…
“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” – Luke 6:38 William Shakespeare’s plays have been abridged, modernized, and retold in every conceivable fashion. As the time for curtain approaches for “Measure…