Disco Pigs – Solas Nua

By: Walter Ruff

Disco Pigs

Pig and Runt, two club kids growing up in Cork, Ireland have a lot to say–and for the most part they say it through their actions and emotions rather than dialog that one can readily understand. In fact they have developed a special language they share in their own private world. Like relationships in real life, it’s sometimes one’s actions that speak louder than words. We grow up believing in the power of friendship—the love, trust, and bonds we create and nurture over time seem indestructible. Sadly, however, these very elements are able to explode in what seems like seconds. This is what Pig and Runt discover as they shared their seventeenth birthday dancing, crashing and fighting in Cork’s underbelly. Pig is a violent and extremely emotional young man–seemingly a poster child for childhood mental health counseling. He is always ready to fight for his self assigned cause. Runt is his security blanket; he wraps himself in her and refuses to let go. She is the careless, happy club girl and seems oblivious to Pig’s growing sexual desires and revels in the wild birthday joy ride. Yet, she knows she wants more from life and wants eventually to distance herself from Pig’s increasingly violent outbursts. . These best friends and “partners-in-crime” who share almost everything the closest comrades possibly can, soon find that friends never love one each other equally and friendships rarely are forever.

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Plays That Say Something: Giving The Emperor Jones A Chance To Speak

By Noelle Wilson

Brutus Jones

Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones is a play one often has to read, but rarely gets a chance to see. Many people will say that, in order to realize a play, it must ring true to the time period; it must be able to spark something in the contemporary audience. Why then does a play about an African-American criminal enslaving a population of jungle natives and then going mad amidst the shrubbery appeal to the modern theatre patron? Because that’s not what the play is about, silly. It is what happens in the play, but what the play is about is an entirely different matter. And there are many reasons why The Emperor Jones does not deserve to be shelved because of its period. The Emperor Jones chronicles one night in the life of Brutus Jones, an African-American exile from the states who, with the help of a good story and a lucky silver bullet, has installed himself as a tyrant over the native people. When his servants abandon him for the hills, where a ceremonial drumbeat adds a menacing flavor to their unseen preparations, Jones takes off into the jungle, hunted by his subjects and haunted by things long past.

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