Urban Blight

The everyday horrors of city life make for eerie drama

DERELICTS URINATE ON WALLS or from bridges onto passersby. Shopgirls get picked up in bars and wind up raped by men who think they are merely having fun. Deranged people wander about, talking to themselves or roaring confrontationally at strangers. An ill-advised glance at a fellow subway passenger leads to threats of mayhem. These are everyday realities in many big American cities, unbearable yet borne, mostly in grim, self-imposed blindness and deafness to what is all around. They somehow become more resistant to willful ignorance when placed on the stage in a play as eerily uninflected as Howard Korder's The Lights...

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