We shall answer that pressing question later when we, along with Art Council Director of Artistic Services and Programs Debbie Hesse, analyze Moran’s second contribution to the exhibition: a photograph of a Florida roadside sign, large blue letters on a white background enticing passing motorists with the physically challenging lure, “Feed Live Gators While Golfing.”

In fact signage in all its great American variety – for we, after all, are the great and often guilty progenitors of all things advertising – along with recurrent strains of humor were two of the themes in this engaging exhibition of some 60 works guest-curated by Suzan Shutan. (She is pictured beside New Haven photographer Paul Duda’s print of a country lane in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.) Shutan, a member of the Council’s visual arts advisory council and a photographer herself, said she has wanted to do such an exhibition since the 1970s when she came across a book, whose title escaped her, listing alphabetically by city and state quirky “roadside attractions” all across America and how to get there.

“I still have that book, and it guides me on all kinds of adventures still.” This exhibition, she explained, came together quickly when she put out the word. Contributors could interpret “road” any way they wanted to. The only restriction is that it had to be the American road. “As it turned out almost all these artists are in mid-career – including Sven Martson, whose intriguing Fellini-esque "FDR (1974) NYC" is pictured. "They are in important collections, experienced, and recipients of grants. With so many shows in the art world featuring ‘new and emerging photographers,’” she said, “it’s really a pleasure to call attention to these mid-career people in all their accomplishments.”

Most of the photographers, such as Joy Bush, did not create works specifically for the exhibition. But being photographers, have for many years snapped pictures along the roadside, and were able to respond to Shutan’s call by drawing from their archives for “Roadside Attractions.” Bush is standing beside her photograph of a bust of Pope Pius XI from Holy Land USA, an 18-acre religious theme park, complete with a paper mache Bethlehem Inn, with a No Vacancy sign in front of it. “I was driving on Route 8 near Waterbury,” she explained, “in 1976, and I saw all these crosses along the road. I followed, and lo and behold, here was a quirky Biblical theme park, complete with the three kings and all the classic scenes. It was oddly spiritual, in no small part because the tackiness was mitigated by the tinfoil and chicken wire used to make many of the replicas. Now it’s all in disrepair and falling apart, tended by an order of nuns up there who are really not able to take care of it. It was started by a bizarre Yalie, and now, well, I make a pilgrimage there once every few years and photograph it. I find it moving.”

The humor in the photographs often has a social and political edge, it seemed to gallery visitor Cindy Sedlmeyer. Challenged by a reporter to find the humor in this photograph “Strategic Aerospace Museum” (Nebraska) by San Strembicki, she said: “Look at this broken-down bench right beside this missile. It’s as if to say,’Come on kids, bring the cooler and let’s sit down next to this rocket.'" There’s generally not enough humor in the art world, she said, and this exhibition is refreshingly different in that regard.

The oddball, quirky, and humorous should not be construed to lack serious artistic intent. “Everyone takes a camera and makes snapshots,” said Shutan, “and that’s good, because everyone understands what a roadside attraction means. But what some of these artists do by way of exploring different ways of seeing is really amazing.”

In Paul Duda’s work, for example, all the exposures are a minimum of 26 minutes. Why? “That’s the amount of time I’ve calculated that it takes, on average, for the light in the sky to shift. Anyone can take a picture of a grand site, a Yellowstone, or a gorgeous view along the roadside, and it will be grand. But try making grandeur out of your backyard. What I try to do is organize common objects, in a backyard, for example, and with the camera’s long exposure and the relationship among the elements it will add up to a kind of grandeur.” This summer Duda is publishing a book of his photographs of hutongs, alleys and backyards, of Beijing, China.

Video artist Howard Better has three panels in the exhibition. They are all stills pulled from his video cross dissolves, scenes of a flag, a wheelchair, and a hammer, all shot in the Bronx and other parts of New York. “I’m interested in the moment of transition from one image to another,” he said. “We see or really what we do is remember one image and it’s always in comparison with another. Our maps are constantly changing.” Like all the artists showing in the Council’s gallery, he has more, in his case, seven more panels, and larger-size work on display at the Kehler Liddel Gallery.

Another photographer, who also wears a different hat, as a sculptor, is Johanna Bresnick of New Haven. Her piece, Dromos I, features photographs of signs, diners, and buildings, including many damaged by hurricanes and other disasters, which she has taken along I-95 between Connecticut and Florida documenting the whole of that gloriously frustrating road. In her case, as a sculptor, she has cut out the photos, overlaid them, and given them a three-dimensionality that changes how they are seen if you move by them, as you would do on a real road, or, in the gallery, along the dark asphalt-looking black-painted vinyl that makes up two thirds of her composition. Dromos II, stretching six feet, is at the Kehler Liddel Gallery. She displayed her whole Dromos (Greek for race), in a 30-foot circular installation some years ago at the John Slade Ely House.

So why was Aidan Moran wearing his presidential lame-duck blazer? His son, Sam, who had fled from his father in embarrassment and preferred to be photographed beneath the brontosaurus, wasn’t sure. Moran’s artist statement, on the label beside the photo, gives a clue: “Get in car. Drive. One eye on road and other on roadside. See something cool. Jam on brakes. Slow down. Reverse. Go around the back. Stop the car. Get out. Photograph. Laugh. Repeat.” You will laugh, and repeat laugh at Roadside Attractions, which runs through March 16. The Small Space Gallery at 70 Audubon is open 9 to 5. The Kehler Liddel Gallery, where larger format works by the same photographers are to be seen, will be open weekends only in February, from 10 to 2. All the works are also for sale.

Oh, why the blazer? Moran said he was wearing it for the last time in a while because tomorrow he's relinquishing it to be hung in an exhibition at the Golden Street Gallery in New London. The name of that exhibition is “Stuck on You.”

The Independent sat down during dress rehearsal with playwright Jafferis (on left in the photo), who graduated from Hillhouse High and currently teaches theater writing and poetry at various Elm City schools and with producer, Rafael Ramos, founder of Bregamos (middle in photo, with Bregamos’ board member Dino Monteiro), and asked: Why this particular play? Why now? Why in Fair Haven? And with what message or feeling did they want their audiences to leave the theater?

RR: You know I saw Kingdom in workshop in New York, where, by the way, it won an award for most promising new musical at the New York Musical Theater Festival, and I fell in love with it in the first three minutes. The subject, the hip hop musical style, it all speaks to us in New Haven, at this time. You know I’ve had members of my family too shot down on the streets. Bregamos is dedicated to creating theater out of the real life stories in the community, and this is it.

AJ: It means a lot for me to have this play in New Haven. I grew up here. It’s the place I want to live. I love this city but I want it to be better, and one way it can be a lot better is not to have young people die at ridiculous rates. It’s hip hop but it’s for adults and kids. I want the play to engage older people to come up with solutions and younger people to see themselves on the stage and to prevent that from happening to them.

NHI: Do you really think theater can accomplish social change?

AJ: Look, theater can be a rehearsal for life. Let it happen in theater that kids feel uncared for, or powerless, and do terrible things in order to feel that they belong. Let us all understand that, and leave here to do something about it, as kids and as adults, then our job will be done. One of the big realizations people will get, I hope, is that in this society we have allowed a level of violence to occur in the city. And one of the most interesting things for me is that that the same language of violence, of proving yourself, of manhood and all that is also the language of our national life. The lead gang banger in the play (Andres, at left in the photo, played by Yale senior Gabriel Hernandez) berates his friend Juan (played by ECA high schooler Michael Improta) with language almost identical to that which George Bush uses: “We have to get them before they get us.” Or: “We have to retaliate to prove ourselves strong.” That’s exactly what’s heard in a gang culture in New Haven and other cities, where strength and power are associated with violence and not with communication and relationship. But if it’s there in our national life, how can you entirely blame the kids! Let the adults leave the theater thinking about that.

RR: We’re producing this play in part to encourage dialogue about the violence in the city, and that means we’re going to have panel discussions and forums based on the play (on Saturday, Feb. 10, for example). But in a larger sense, we’re here in Fair Haven and doing a play for people who don’t normally go to Yale or to the Long Wharf. They are going to see their lives on the stage and lives of their kids and they are going to be talking about it among themselves. That’s a way to give people a measure of power. And then following this run, we’re going to do a whole series of workshops for 13 to 18 year olds. The kids are going to do monologues about their lives; it’s remarkable the stuff that will come up. Yes, theater can be very therapeutic.

AJ: I’m also particularly excited about the way Bregamos is bringing in actors from all over this community, trained and not. Five of the eight actors have not really acted before. But they all can really rap. The kids doing the light and sound are learning that craft for the first time (in the photo: Satchel Ramos to the right of Jaffreis and Ernesto Otelo, from the Sound School and Wilbur Cross respectively).We also of course want to make young people like this excited about theater. Part of what leads people to violence is this lack of belonging to anything, and theater is a great community that, like hip hop, spans all kinds of boundaries. Hey, I would be thrilled if someone sees Kingdom and concludes: This play absolutely does not reflect my life. I think I'm going to write a play to kick this hip hop play's butt. That would be terrific.

RR: Yes, theater is a lot more than acting. Like Aaron says, it's huge, with a very wide skill range. It’s stage set and it’s marketing, and I must say that the degree of community support for Kingdom is remarkable. It’s a first for Bregamos, enabling us – and this is our seventh production – actually to pay stipends to the principals for the first time and to advertise. We’re going to bring in people not only from Fair Haven but Hartford, Norwalk. This play, in subject, and in how it’s bringing theater to the community and the community to theater is really a turning point for Bregamos. And stay tuned: Our next production will be a stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird. We’ll recruit cast for that show from our monologue workshops in the spring.

Other actors in the production include Vanessa Soto (pictured), Efrain Garcia, and Anthony Rivera.

Mark Villani (on the right), who teaches stage craft to kids at Hamden High School and is also with the Yale Repertory Theater props department, did the set, assisted by Pat Newsome. Music is by Ian Williams, like Jafferis, a graduate of New York University’s MFA Musical Theatre Writing program, and the play is directed by Dexter Singleton (too busy to be pictured), who previously collaborated on Bregamos’s last production of Stephen Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the A Train.

Kingdom plays at the Fair Haven Middle School black box theater – by the way, the first production, since the school renovation, in this wonderful 99-seat New Haven gem — Feb. 8, 10, 20, 11, 15, 16, and 17. All shows are at 8 p.m. The producers say there is enough violent language to suggest only ages 13 and up attend, with parental consent. Tickets can be purchased by calling 203-643-2314 or by email: bregamostheater@aol.com.

Audience questions probed the writer’s background as well as that of her work. Born in Malaysia but ethnically Chinese, Choong conceived Firewife as the story of eight women of Chinese heritage who live outside China, scattered across several countries. These largely disconnected stories are unified by Nin, a photographer who leaves her corporate job in California to travel and photograph women throughout the world.

Several in the audience who, like Choong, were native speakers of other languages, were particularly interested to learn that she had written the novel entirely in English. When asked how she made the transition to writing in English, Choong reminisced about an influential teacher; “She told me to let go of my editorial self.”

Such notions of writing as a largely uncritical process came up several times in Choong’s comments. She later noted that “Writing for me is very organic; I’m carried away by emotion."

Choong also shied away from attempts to characterize her work exclusively in any tradition. Instead she emphasized her sense that she, and her work, are “straddling several different cultures.”

She also explained that the decision to situate all her characters outside China was “definitely a conscious choice.” Alluding to her characters, which include a young Thai prostitute, a woman who serves as a nude table for Japanese businessmen, and a young girl who rents her forehead to advertisers in Taipei, she explained, “These are the effects of Chinese diaspora.”

A Yale Ph.D. candidate, Choong has taken a leave of absence to promote Firewife. When a colleague in Yale’s literature department asked how her graduate studies had affected her fictional work, she responded, “It’s actually interrelated.” Her dissertation also dealt with evolving notions of Chinese women’s sexuality, a central theme in her novel. Ultimately, Choong’s background in literary criticism shaped her writing and her audience.

She did have to grapple with some difficult questions. One audience member commented, “Each of the women [in the novel] reinforce stereotypes” about Asian women. She wondered, “Where are you going with this?”

After joking, “That is the question I most fear,” Choong gamely responded, “I’m hoping that my readers will read them as a collection of eight women” and see in the stories “pure emotional truth” rather than stereotypes.

Of course the show wasn’t only about the dancing. Visitors also enjoyed delicious Caribbean food, and there was even some art to see, as well. Passing through each room, visitors examined much the work Arroyo has completed during the past six years. Ranging over two floors, the show includes massive, dramatic silk screens of African deities, hand crafted paper and metallic-fabric boats floating near waves of blue cloth, a multimedia presentation, and perhaps most memorably, a space filled with disembodied heads.

In a single room upstairs, Arroyo installed 27 life-sized high-gloss glazed clay busts with detached hands, each seemingly imbedded in the hardwood floor on sea of blue silk. Like the rest of the show, this exhibit draws on Arroyo’s dual Puerto Rican and African heritage. Titled “Ancestors of the Passage”, the piece alludes to the Middle Passage, referring to the practice of forcing Africans to cross the Atlantic Ocean as cargo to be sold into slavery. “They are people that died in the Middle Passage – emerging from the water to remind us of their gifts,” Arroyo explains. Her work conceives of the Middle Passage as a recurring, haunting link between Africa and the Americas.

Almost as arresting are the giant silk screens two of which are situated along the staircase. Measuring four by 17 feet, these depict the waves of the Atlantic, this time dotted with skulls. Arroyo chuckled as she explained that much of her large scale pieces essentially take over her house as she works. “They must really love me,” she mused, referring to her family, “to put up with it.”

She also noted that such work “emulates narrative by creating a journey for the viewer.” The layout of the exhibition echoes that function of the larger works, with each room guiding the viewer’s exploration of a different major work or group of works.

Annette Dudley, an art teacher at King Robinson, noted that the show gets away from the walls. Many of the pieces hang from threads in the ceiling, while others have been carefully positioned on the floor. According to Dudley, the three-dimensional installations are aggressively “in your face, but in a very elegant way.”

Dudley is one of many New Haven teachers who will bring her art classes on a field trip to see the exhibit this month. The program was organized by Nilda Morales, arts supervisor for New Haven public schools and a friend of the artist. Arroyo is a teacher, as well, and chairs the visual arts department at Eastern Connecticut State University.

On February 10 at 2 p.m., Arroyo will give a talk on the exhibition at the John Slade Ely House. Like the reception, this event will be free and open to the public. Arroyo is also participating in a Latin American show that opens February 23rd at the Lyman Allen Museum.

Around 5 o’clock, many people began to trickle out the door, but the artist had a few parting words for one younger visitor. He stared resolutely at his shoes, but found the courage to ask, “When did you start making art?” She responded, “A long, long time ago, when I was very young, about your age.”

Click on the play arrow below to watch a video clip from the event.

One of the pleasures of this exhibition (which runs through March 30) – posters, official books, working documents, maps, postcards, and souvenirs – is that through the fairs you can trace pretty much the history of the world in the last 200 years, along with fascinating factual side shows.

In the street level of the exhibition, the Eiffel Tower receives much deserved attention. But did you know that at the time it was finished, 1889, to mark the centennial of the French Revolution, the tallest structure in the world was the Washington Monument, at 600 feet, which was opened to the public only a year before? Or that the response of many artists to Eiffel’s creation was so extreme that in the case of writer Guy de Maupassant, he dined out almost exclusively at restaurants at the base of the tower? Why? To paraphrase him, “That is the only place in the city where you are not forced to look at it!”

As the informative labels point out, the fairs were a model or laboratory for city planning because creating a model city, with an eye to adequate infrastructure, beauty and hygiene and efficient transportation, if only for a year’s display, brought inventive minds to cope with rapidly growing problems of real cities. One reason, the exhibition suggests, that Paris is so beautiful is that more than any modern city, its contours and structures reflect the no less than seven international exhibitions staged there between 1855 and 1937. Whereas cities like San Francisco and New York semi-exiled their fairs on the city’s outskirts (Flushing Meadows, Queens), Paris had its Eiffel Tower and much else that was by design plunked in the heart of the metropolis. The look of the Seine, the Left Bank-Right Bank configuration, as well as many structures like the Grand Palais and Petit Palais are fair-triggered. But France was doing that since the Revolution (and before), displaying progress and enlightenment whether the world approved or not, and then England, Germany, and the U.S.A., in that order raced to catch up with their own fairs. America apparently really did it, first, at the 1876 Philadelphia Exhibition, with displays of enough machinery that Europe began to worry about an American industrial “peril.” My favorite item from 1876 is a post card showing the giant hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty, the severed limb alone, which France sent to Philadelphia for that occasion.

Highlights upstairs at the Beinecke, where the exhibition continues, are documents showing the fairs of the early to mid-twentieth century, where exploitation, to use the word of the curators, of both displaying countries’ colonies and hawking their products took front and center. Picasso apparently loved attending the pavilions that showed African masks and materials from France’s African holdings and he may have begun his African art collecting based on such visits.

The “Century of Progress”-themed 1933 Chicago exhibition shows the first profound corporate presence, where “Hoover Vacuums Celebrated a Century of Progress” and Wonder Bread debuted as the only bread baked at the World’s Fair. Housewives apparently thrilled to the spotless cleanliness, the mighty ovens, and the never-before-seen machines that made each and every slice perfect. I’ll take a peanut butter sandwich right now, thank you.

Will there be a long future to fairs? Look carefully at every utopia – and every fair is a mini utopia – and the shadow of the fall is usually not too far away. Thus the cover poster of the 1933 Chicago fair (pictured at top) features a commercial airplane – or is it military? – chugging at a steep angle in front of climbing skyscrapers, an image that has an ominous graphic echo for us in 2007. World War Two took the air out of the fair movement, but it is rebounded in 1958, in Brussels, where the Russians’ Sputnik faced off against our Atoms for Peace. Even though the display items in these cases at the exhibition’s end – too many uninspiring travel guides – imply that the grand era is over, the most recent world’s fairs have been, apparently great successes. In Aichi, Japan at century’s end, more than 50 million visitors came, a number rivaling only the attendees at the 1964 fair in New York, where your reporter, newly arrived from L.A., dutifully lined up to see Michelangelo’s Pieta.

The curators’ parting labels suggest that perhaps the advent of the Internet and the very technological spirit that spawned fairs now has created such a virtual world that a physical ingathering of new inventions and millions of curious visitors may be obsolete. Even as we tour the exhibition, however, the fair in Shanghai is being readied for 2010. I just might start saving up for a ticket.

The official version is: This is a French asylum. An insane asylum.

Some of us gathered here in the New Theater on Chapel Street came in as "the audience." We came to watch a play staged by the Yale School of Drama, running through Jan. 27, called Marat/Sade. (Details here.) It's an updating of a play by Peter Weiss about, well, another play, supposedly written by the Marquis de Sade and performed in 1808 by insane asylum inmates. It concerns the pending assassination of revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in 1793 -- and the debate between Marat and Sade about whether to continue to believe in revolution. The play has been updated, with lots of music added, and general mayhem.

Walking into the theater is a disorienting experience, on purpose. The space has been redesigned as the interior of the asylum. Some of the "audience members" sit on the floor alongside "actors." Characters start "cleaning up" and interacting with patrons before the play's beginning. Most of the audience sits on risers; behind us are rifle-bearing guards. The point: We're all inside the asylum together. Our roles are blurred. So's the line between idealism and cynicism, between guards and inmates, between the insane and the idealistic.

"We hope to leave you disturbed," director Nelson T. Eusebio III has written in the playbill. It's working already. The play starts; the lights remain on. In case we don't make it out of here, in case we get locked up first, or just lose our minds, maybe it's a good idea just to jot down some notes. For the record.

• * * * *

The basic themes are pretty apparent pretty fast. Are we all inmates? Is revolution crazy? Or are revolutionaries crazy? Do crazy people make revolutions? Or do revolutions make people crazy?

Marat (Joseph Parks, shown with Jamel Rodriguez as de Sade) is clearly going crazy. He spends the play inside a bathtub, writing one more piece to inspire the masses.

He struggles to see the paper amid the smoke of burning corpses outside, the detritus of a revolution that everyone, except Marat, recognizes has gone unspeakably wrong.

Marat looks familiar in that bathtub. Where have I seen him before?

Oh yeah. In an art history class almost 30 years ago. That didn't feel like an asylum, exactly.

We know Marat will be bludgeoned to death by the end of the evening. Suspense: Will he completely lose it first?

Will we?

* * * *

"We should all carry weapons these days..."

* * * *

The Marquis de Sade is taunting Marat for his continued faith. "For you as for me," he says, "only the most extreme actions matter." De Sade (the father of sadism) orchestrates all the singing and dancing and miming and panting of the twisted characters around him, taking sexual liberties with man and woman alike. A rock band is playing in the background.

Where have I seen this before?

Oh yeah. That's where. The audience was part of the asylum in Rocky Horror, too. Only here, Dr. Frank N. Furter loses his charm as the Marquis de Sade. Again, that's on purpose. The menacing, the "disturbing," overwhelms the titillating.

Is de Sade's hopeless sadism merely a new variant from the sadism of the revolution? Or does the new form embody more idealism, more hope, than he's willing to acknowledge?

* * * *

A priest in a straitjacket dreams that churches be converted into schools. Then, finally, something "useful" can be taught in the schools. The nurses haul him away, of course.

When is the "script" being followed? Coulmier (Nicholas Carrere), the hospital director, orders lines taken out; the guards or nurses interrupt scenes that get "out of hand."

* * * *

Marat: "I do not know if I am hangman or victim... Everything fills me with horror."

De Sade: "For me the only reality is my imagination. The revolution no longer interests me."

* * * *

"Long live watery broth!"

"Long live the revolution!"

* * * *

The inmates are climbing a stepladder. One by one they act out being guillotined. Then their "lifeless" bodies flop down onto mattresses. They make beheading look like fun. Is that what revolutions do?

* * * *

Any updating of a play requires searching for its modern context with which to challenge us. (Well, some work better than others.) It's easy to find the modern parallels here: the asylum director spells them out. He speaks in -- guess what? -- a Southern accent curiously like that of a current American president. And like that president he suppresses freedom in the name of waging a war.

Yes, that might be heavy-handed. But in a funny way, it actually offers hope here. Indeed, the director writes in his notes he found hope for the "Theatre of the Absurd" of our current politics in the pages of this old play. We find it now in the contest between the director and De Sade over what scenes will be performed, what lines will be uttered. There's no clear winner, it seems. That has to do for hope these days.

We'll take it.

The director is clapping down on the floor of the asylum. But the "audience members" aren't.

I thought this play was over. How will we know when it has ended? Will it end?

That's what makes this New York import a must-see. (The show runs through Feb. 10. Click here for details.)

The two women in question are Abigail, a newscaster on government-controlled Zimbabwe national television; and Nia, a sometimes-homeless teenager from South Central L.A. Both have just found out they're pregnant -- and they have HIV.

The gifted actresses who wrote their parts and portray them onstage -- Danai Gurira (at right in photo) and Nikkole Salter (at left) -- originally developed their characters separately. They discovered each other in an NYU course. And they discovered the similar paths on which these two characters from such different worlds were headed.

So they collaborated to produce this remarkable two-woman show. They share the stage, taking turns with their one-woman performances. The cut-ins emphasize the common challenges the two characters face: wrestling with the fate of their unborn children; weighing what this means for their personal dreams; encountering tone-deaf social workers and clinicians; sifting through wildly different advice from friends and family; and, most of all, how to break the news to the men who infected them but will now most surely blame and abandon them.

Yet the story, while sad, isn't depressing. One reason: Both actresses have a gift for portraying multiple characters, down to their quirks and foibles. They laugh, crack jokes, and they cry. These aren't monologues; the actresses carry out conversations with unseen, unheard others. And they play multiple characters. It's as though Anna Deavere-Smith were appearing in double, with double the impact.

Like Deavere-Smith bringing to stage the human complexities and multiple perspectives on the L.A. riots, Gurira and Salter capture the humor displayed by people in tragic circumstances. In the process they extract the hopefulness of the human spirit, without in any way downplaying the horror or violence underlying the characters' plight.

Gurira and Slater have taken this show around the world. They've used it to call attention to the devastating impact AIDS has had on black people of all backgrounds. As the program notes: Half of all new HIV/AIDS cases in the U.S. afflict African-Americans and close to two-thirds of the cases in the world are concentrated just in sub-Saharan Africa.

Onstage, In The Continuum doesn't dwell on such statistics. It tells a story. Two stories. About two women who dreamed of a better life, as parents, as lovers, as artists/performers (a poet and a public speaker), and who now confront the shattering of all those dreams thanks to the promiscuousness of the men to whom they're devoted.

A defining moment comes when Abigail recites a speech she'd written as a schoolgirl to win a public-speaking contest. The speech extolled "the new African woman -- modernizing and post-colonizing," no longer just one of three wives confined to the home.

Abigail breaks down before finishing the speech, as she recognizes that her own life will fail to fulfill the script.

HIV delivered the bad news for Abigail and Nia. It served as the agent of despair. But as the play unfolds, the dominance of men over women emerges as the killer. Prescriptions come in the form of how to confront the men in these women's lives, not in the form of a drug cocktail.

Abigail and Nia take turns rehearsing speeches through which they plan to assert themselves to the men in their lives. As they recite, the stage lighting casts their shadows in giant forms behind them. It's a fitting accompaniment to a vision of women's empowerment in the face of oppression.

Significantly, the specific charity for which this production raises money helps Zimbabwean girls. The story told onstage is to be continued offstage.

There's no preaching in this production, although there are two wrenching prayers. Gurira and Salter have succeeded in convincing their audience to join in those prayers.

Most of the photographs in the show are outdoor scenes. All were taken without the use of a flash, including an impressively executed long exposure shot of a wall of human bones at the claustrophobic catacombs in Paris and slightly ominous, hovering picture of boys fishing at the edge of a placid river.

Yet many of Hungaski’s images are curious in the sense of wonder and interest rather than oddity. These images explore a photographer’s capacity to inspire, share and record curiosity in his subjects. One of the most striking images in the show, “Curious Woman," captures the figure of an anonymous woman from behind as she leans into a tall shrub. Her head is obscured between the branches, and the image practically dares the viewer not to share in her inquisitiveness. Something unknown, which only she can see, has prompted a conservatively dressed, middle-aged woman nearly to disappear into an enormous hedge.

Hungaski explained his international experience: “I traveled in Europe, and did shows there." He took a substantial number of the photographs in the Exposure show while in Paris, and also met his son’s mother there. When she moved to Argentina, he discovered a new culture and a new set of images.

A novel twist on his sense of conspiratorial interest is dramatically conveyed by one of these. Hungaski directed his attention to a deeply mysterious photographer who wields his own camera. The image archly raises questions about where (and on what) the Argentine has trained his tremendous, old-fashioned lens, and at the same time leaves us wondering whether all Argentinian photographers dress like members of the Italian mafia. These pictures are indeed curious.

Hungaski, who remembers early experiences taking pictures at church services in his hometown of Stamford, has been taking photographs since his childhood, over 30 years ago. Despite his penchant for travel, he still resides in Connecticut, today in Milford, and is a familiar figure in the New Haven arts community. As he mingled among the guests, he chatted with old friends from the New Haven Photo Arts Collective. Hungaski was gracious and attentive, if slightly unnerved by the role of host.

The Curious Photographs of Andrew Hungaski will remain open to the public, at the Exposure Gallery, 1 Whitney Ave., free of charge, until Jan. 30.

The exhibit features a display case full of sketches Templeton made for CBS News in 1971 when he observed the murder and conspiracy trial of two people labeled subversives by the U.S. government, national Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins. The state sought the death penalty for the pair in connection with the 1969 torture and murder in New Haven of falsely accused spy Alex Rackley. The trial attracted national attention and protests.

The subversive nature of the new Yale exhibit has nothing to do with the Panthers, FBI tactics, or SDSers and other militants who gathered on the New Haven Green at the time vowing to burn down the town.

Instead, the act of subversion was Templeton's drawings themselves. He defied the judge by drawing them, on the sly. There were strict rules at the trial: No photographs. And no drawings.

The order came from Judge Harold Mulvey. Mulvey proved the most interesting, perhaps even redeeming, character in the trial drama. He started out despising the Panthers, their supporters, and civil-rights leaders. He ended up setting Seale and Huggins free in the wake of a lack of solid evidence against them. Mulvey proved that, contrary to doubts expressed by Yale's then-president, Kingman Brewster, a black revolutionary could indeed receive a fair trial in America.

Yet this exhibit shows how even an exceptionally fair-minded jurist could succumb to petty, unreasonable rules in the courtroom that call into question the openness of the legal system, like the one prohibiting illustrations.

A 1972 Waterbury Republican article included in the Beinecke display describes how Mulvey met personally with Templeton after deputy sheriffs escorted the surreptitious artist out of Courtroom B for the second time.

"The judge reminded him that he was accredited as a reporter and not as a working artist. ''He said to me,' recalled the artist, ''"You can't look up and down.'" The judge was trying to impress on Templeton that he had to work as a reporter, looking at his pad, while listening."

The apocalyptic days surrounding the trial seem like a century, not just 36, years past. However, the arbitrariness of the court system continues. The public, including reporters, still can't bring cameras into the state and federal courthouses in downtown New Haven. Nor cell phones.

Some of the restrictions have to do with post-9/11 security. But some, like the camera restrictions, well predated 2001. Rather than establishing a sense of order, they shut the public out. They make the proceedings of Justice, so important to have on the widest possible display, less visible to the wider world.

Yet Robert Templeton managed to capture all the key players, and the feeling of the courtroom, in sketches that were flashed to the nation. That qualifies him as a hero for the public interest.

And it qualifies the Beinecke display as a worthy contribution to the unearthing of history. Templeton's sketches fill a multi-part display case a good eight feet high. Yet the exhibit shrinks in magnitude against the backdrop of Beinecke's marble walls, which rise at least five times as high. In context, it makes for an inspiring scene. Because unlike the marble walls in the Elm Street courthouse where the Panther trial took place, Beinecke's marble walls let the sunlight in.

Although these were paid skills-building internships, in which the kids learned all aspects of video from scripting to post production, and were funded by stipends from CFGNH, they were very much labors of love as well.

For example, Nicole Smith’s (center) documentary “A Letter With No Destination,�? showed a montage of the very few photographs of her father that she possessed, since he died before she was born. Smith, a sophomore at Wilbur Cross, spoke in haunting over-voice: “Dear Daddy, I love you even though I’ve never met you. I cry every father’s day because I have no one to celebrate with. I get mad at others who are angry with their fathers. They don’t know what it feels like not to have one. How I wanted you to be my escort to the 8th grade prom. I think of you so often. Please be my shield. I’ll always love you.�?

In “Then My Life Changed,�? David Romero (at right in photo) began his documentary with these words over the photograph of a stunning young woman in green dress: “This is my mom,�? he says. “She’s sixteen years old and, believe it or not, she’s eight months pregnant with me.�? Romero’s film then shifts to the birth of his brother, whose skin is much lighter than his own, has freckles, and red hair, prompting Romero to ask his mom where this new arrival came from. The film has a happy ending, with the brothers getting along famously and sharing a room and secrets.

And Rahkiya Davis’s (left in photo) shows some bleak scenes of the Hill neighborhood and asks, “Why do people become like this? So poor. So many homeless people. It isn’t right. If it’s cold outside, I’d give someone my coat.�? Davis, a freshman at Eli Whitney High School, practices what she preaches. She volunteers at shelters, and donates all her old clothing to the poor.

The project director was Magalis Martinez, an accomplished teacher and digital media producer whose book and movie (both titled Bastards of the Party), on the warfare between the Crips and Bloods gangs in Los Angeles, are both forthcoming.

“These kids are remarkable,�? she said after the films were screened. “I’ve worked in Hollywood for ten years with some very tough, no-nonsense bosses, and I was tough with the kids. They learned great skills. Some are going to pursue it as a career. It just goes to show if we give kids the resources, they can all rise to compete in college and out in the world. We need many more programs like this.�?

Anna Arroyo, a senior philanthropic officer with the CFGNH, explained that the workshop grew out of meetings of the Hill Neighborhood Forum back in 2005, in which skills-building, community-enriching, and paid opportunities for young people emerged as a preeminent need. A related project was also launched at that time, the “mapping�? of the Hill through extensive interviews (using laptops) with more than a hundred young people (ages 12 to 21) asking them what they think of the Hill and what they need that’s not there. Keshon Earl (shown standing with Arroyo) worked on the mapping as well as produced a movie in the workshop.

“In 2005,�? she said, “we heard from people that they felt isolated here, cut off, and the digital storytelling, which the young people are now going to teach to the adults, is improving the quality of life here and helping to restore and redeem local pride.�?

The responses, in the question and answer period, certainly bore this out. Several fatherless women in the audience complimented Nicole Smith on her courage. Another questioner asked Rodney Atkins, a Hillhouse senior, the meaning of the gripping image of crackling fire that opened and was a visual theme of his movie, “The Epic.�?

“My parents were always fighting,�? he explained, with the self-possessed candor that characterized all the young moviemakers. “I’m angry, I need to express myself. They put the fire in me, I guess.�? Atkins, who hopes to study technology at the University of Southern California, was removed from his natural parents when he was very young and has been raised in New Haven by a grandmother he adores. His parents have not seen the film yet.

And when they do? “Look,�? he said. “You can’t erase the past, I need to create my identity, and this is a big part of it.�?

The ten stories will be available soon in streaming video on the website of the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven (cfgnh.org). Five to seven high schoolers (freshmen to seniors) will replace the graduating seniors as the workshop moves, in 2007, into its second year. Those interested should email Martinez at this address.

Still, while the two hours worth of selections all fit neatly under the title "Guitar Chamber Music," they nevertheless showed the breadth of that category, both in form and performance.

In other words, the casual listener would still listen to the free-flowing changes of a piece like Paulo Bellinati's "Jongo," as performed by Simon Powis and Dave Veslocki (click on the play arrow for a sampling), and observe the rigid categories of "chamber" and "classical" float away.

That was especially true when Powis and Veslocki ignored the nylon strings of their guitars for an interlude. If you didn't know better, you might have thought you'd temporarily moved to a "Drum Chamber Music" -- or just "Drum Music" -- concert. Click on the play arrow below to watch.

The final piece was the evening's climax, the American premiere performance of Shingo Fuji's three-part Concerto do Los Angeles. All seven guitarists, who had earlier played in smaller ensembles with each other or accompanists on other instruments, performed the piece together. Julian Pellicano conducted; Rupert Boyd soloed.

The piece reflected the pacing of the entire evening. Each of the concert's two sets reached back centuries to begin -- Bach in the first set, Scarlatti after intermission -- then progressed to more modern composers. Similarly, Concerto de Los Angeles began with a movement named for, and very much in the E minor-to-B7 mode, of Fernando Sor. (At least that's how this very amateur blues guitarist recognizes it.) Then it progressed to more modern variations.

Click on the play arrow here for a sampling of that first movement. Then click again on the play arrow at the top of this article to hear how, in the third and final movement, the guitarists' parts built on each other, one by one, to a sound that would find a home on Windham Hill or Rounder Records as easily as in Sprague Hall.

As always in the Verdery-inspired guitar concerts to which New Haven is treated a couple of times each year (often free of charge, as on Monday night), the beautiful results were grounded in tradition and liberated to explore worlds unbound by category or physics.

The tale of what happens to Mikhail Bulgakov's play in the hands of the Yale Rep is neither comedy nor tragedy. Rather, it's a cautionary tale of about how to revive and update, and how not to revive and update, cutting-edge work from another place and time.

The production is an updating of the satirical script written by Bulgakov, an early Soviet-era novelist and playwright who died in 1940. The play must have been packed with irony and subversion when Bulgakov wrote it. Bulgakov faced the whims of Soviet censors; eventually his work was banned. Stalin denied him power to emigrate. He wrote Black Snow at a time when writers faced life-or-death threats to their freedom of expression, a can't-miss theme for any revival. Plus, the play highlights one of the most colorful figures in the history of the theater, Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, the father of method acting. He's always good for a laugh, not to mention passionate debate.

Restaged and updated at the Rep this month, though, Black Snow packs all the power and challenge of a sitcom rerun.

Adam Stein plays Sergei Maxudov, a struggling writer Bulgakov based on himself. Sergei's landfilled novel, Black Snow, is rescued as a script to be produced by the famous, offbeat, imperious director Vasilievich, played by Alvin Epstein and based on Stanislavsky. In between ego-eviscerating encounters with competitors and dramachniks, Sergei watches in horror as the director, who slept through a reading of the script, gradually rips it apart and substitutes incomprehensible plot twists and scenes with the help of a fawning crew (including Ludmimlla, pictured, played by Tamilla Woodard). The only option left at play's end is the one Sergei considered at the play's beginning: killing himself.

Along the way, characters rush on and off stage and fall through the floor, in a succession of fast-paced gags that seemed designed to add up to a confusing, surprising commentary on sycophancy, abuses of power, hopelessness of the lonely author, or ideas of that sort. What surprised me most was how clear and predictable it all was -- when the questions mined by Bulgakov are anything but. Even Stanislavsky was boring. High-handed, yes, humorously arbitrary and fawned over, but not in fresh or multi-dimensional ways. There was no sense of what made him great, or interesting, or able to command devotion. No sense of what ideas motivated him, or why had an impact on people.

That's not Bulgakov's fault. That's the fault of the people in whose hands his play (like his character's script) ends up. A script like this cries out not just for entertaining an audience with slapstick and witty monologues, but for challenging an audience to experience the underlying tensions in its own time and place.

The Yale Cabaret (half of whose crew seemed to be attending or working at Thursday's Black Snow opening) has succeeded in doing that at least twice in the last year.

It revived Max Frisch's 1953 The Firebugs, another absurdist comedy, and made it relevant to post-9/11 America, as well as post-community-policing New Haven -- all avoiding pat answers to tough questions about fear and suspicion and freedom. (Click here for a review of that show.)

A second Cabaret revival dealt with another aspect of what probably worked so well in the original Black Snow and falls short in its New Haven restaging: inevitability. This past summer the Cabaret restaged Ionesco's The New Tenant, in which the audience watches an imperious new tenant somehow force furniture movers to fill his apartment beyond its limits, and then some. The audience knows what'll happen, but remains fascinated in how the ending will look. The staging captured the timeless question, so hard to answer, of why people agree to follow commands they know make no sense and in fact pose a public danger. (Click here for that review.) Watching Black Snow, the audience has a good laugh or three -- and remains decades, and a continent, safely away from the writer's paradise that provoked such a once-challenging story.