By Free Republic | Created at 2024-10-04 04:21:03 | Updated at 2024-10-07 16:29:57
3 days ago
Review: Steep Theatre’s ‘Happy Days are Here (Again)’ is a searing new play about abuse at a Catholic school
Chicago Tribune ^ | Sept. 23, 2024 | Chris Jones
Posted on 10/03/2024 9:06:43 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
John Patrick Shanley’s superb 2005 drama “Doubt: A Parable” explored the scandal of abuse within the Catholic priesthood through the lens of a suspicious and determined sister in charge of a Catholic school in the Bronx in New York. The supremely concise play took place entirely through the lens of what for children are authority figures: a principal, a priest, a parent, a teacher. Kids were neither seen nor heard. Just discussed.
The new play by Omer Abbas Salem, “Happy Days are Here (Again),” which is set at a Catholic elementary school in Chicago in about 1980 and had its world premiere Friday night from Chicago’s ever-courageous Steep Theatre at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre, pays homage to that precursor, not least in its portrayal of how abusers can be careful to groom their victims and to cover up their tracks with charm. But the big difference here is that the main focus in on the students.
We see them in class; we see their attempts both to continue with their normal lives and get away from all of this; we see how fear courses through their young bones when the intercom crackles with a demand for one or the other of them to go to someone’s office, or to “confession,” or whatever other pretense is being employed by those who should be invested only in student wellbeing.
It’s been haunting me all weekend as I write.
The strengths of this piece of theater are many but the one that initially impressed me the most is how carefully and slowly Salem builds the level of horror inside this school, even as he articulates its apparent normalcy. The play has scenes that could be in “Mean Girls” or “The Breakfast Club” as the kids fight for the right to be teenagers.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
TOPICS: Catholic
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To: ConservativeMind
Were you abused by a priest?
It seems to be a topic on which you often post.
2 posted on 10/03/2024 9:09:35 PM PDT by PGR88
To: PGR88
We have FReepers that were.
Seems you don’t care.
3 posted on 10/03/2024 9:15:01 PM PDT by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)
To: ConservativeMind
Seems you don’t care.
No. Its just hard to tell the difference between real concern, and anti-Catholic propaganda.
4 posted on 10/03/2024 9:19:49 PM PDT by PGR88
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