Seeing red!
INSIDE
Dance with death
New play steps into some dark woods
By Julianne Cuba This show has deep roots.
A mother and daughter will
act out their sometimes strained
cross-cultural relationship, while portraying
characters in a new bilingual
nightmare play, “Suicide Forest,”
debuting at the Bushwick Starr on Feb.
27, according to the show’s Japanese-
American playwright.
“The play kind of takes a sharp turn
where it really becomes this revelation
of a mother-daughter relationship,”
said Kristine Haruna Lee, who lives
in Sunset Park. “I use the space of the
play to talk about a mother-daughter
relationship that’s had a lot of obstacles
and language barriers, culture barriers,
and what it means for us to be carrying
this intergenerational pain.”
Lee and her mother, who is a traditional
Japanese Butoh dancer, explored
their language barrier in the 2016 dance
piece “Communing with You.” In the
new 90-minute play, they join a cast of
seven to tell the story of two people —
a high school girl and a middle-aged
salaryman — each trying to navigate a
nightmarish world.
The show takes place in Suicide
Forest, an actual forest at the foot of
Ft. Fuji that is famous as a spot where
people go to kill themselves. Lee plays
a high-school girl trying to escape a
strictly conformist society, who travels
into the woods and meets a supernatural
woman, played by her mother, who
invites people to their deaths.
“In my play, we meet these goats
who are living there and there’s also a
woman who is hurting these goats and
she is a kind of goddess that ushers
people towards their death, called the
shinigami,” said Lee.
Lee said that she was inspired
to explore her own background
and identity on stage after reading
the 1964 Adrienne Kennedy play
“Funnyhouse of a Negro.”
“I was really struck by Kennedy’s
ability to write a play from her kind
of dark psychic landscape, the very
inner vulnerable space, so I set out to
write a place with that same intention,”
she said. “I would say the nightmare
is really pointing to this dark psychic
space, the play itself is digging into
my Japanese and Japanese-American
identity.”
“Suicide Forest” at the Bushwick
Starr (207 Starr St. between Irving and
Wyckoff avenues in Bushwick, www.
thebushwickstarr.org). Feb. 27–March
16, Wed–Sat at 8 pm. $25.
Your entertainment
guide Page 43
Police Blotter ..........................8
Now on Brownstoner .......... 18
Letters .................................... 32
The Right View ....................34
Standing O ............................38
HOW TO REACH US
COURIER L 2 IFE, FEB. 15–21, 2019 DT
This newspaper is not responsible for typographical errors in ads beyond the cost of the space occupied by the error. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019 by Brooklyn Courier Life
LLC. The content of this newspaper is protected by Federal copyright law. This newspaper, its advertisements, articles and photographs may not be reproduced, either in whole
or part, without permission in writing from the publisher except brief portions for purposes of review or commentary consistent with the law. Postmaster, send address changes to
Brooklyn Courier Life LLC, One MetroTech North, 10th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Mail:
Courier Life,
1 Metrotech Center North
10th Floor, Brooklyn,
N.Y. 11201
General Phone:
(718) 260-2500
News Fax:
(718) 260-2592
News E-Mail:
editorial@schnepsmedia.com
Display Ad Phone:
(718) 260-8302
Display Ad E-Mail:
jstern@schnepsmedia.com
Display Ad Fax:
(718) 260-2579
Classified Phone:
(718) 260-2555
Classified Fax:
(718) 260-2549
Classified E-Mail:
classified@schnepsmedia.com
BY JULIANNE MCSHANE
The Feds will investigate
how offi cials at a federal Sunset
Park prison handled a
week-long power outage, during
which more than 1,600 inmates
endured freezing temperatures
and allegedly could
not speak with their lawyers,
leaders of the Department of
Justice announced.
The federal agency’s Offi ce
of the Inspector General, an internal
watchdog arm, will fi nd
out whether offi cials with the
federal Bureau of Prisons “responded
appropriately to the
heat and electricity failures”
caused by a Jan. 27 electrical
fi re at the Metropolitan Detention
Center, reps for the Justice
Department said on Feb.
6. The probe will also determine
if prison offi cials have
“adequate contingency plans
for such an incident,” according
to the reps.
And a separate investigation
conducted by leaders
of the Prisons Bureau — an
agency within the Justice Department
that operates the
29th Street prison between
Second and Third avenues —
will evaluate the facility’s infrastructure
and emergencyresponse
protocol.
The announcement of the
investigations came hours after
nearly 30 pols — including
Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D–Sunset
Park), Rep. Jerrold Nadler
(D–Red Hook), Rep. Max Rose
(D–Bay Ridge), Rep. Hakeem
Jeffries (D–Coney Island),
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D–Flatbush),
and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D–New York) — sent
letters to the Justice Department’s
Inspector General,
Michael Horowitz, and the
Prisons Bureau’s acting director,
Hugh Hurwitz, demanding
they investigate how the
prison is managed, among
other requests.
“The Bureau of Prisons is
responsible for providing the
humane detention of these detainees
— not subjecting them
to third-world conditions,”
read the pols’ missive to Hurwitz,
which also claimed
prison employees’ “arguably
abusive practices” resulted
in the recent “unacceptable”
conditions there.
And Justice Department
offi cials only took action to
improve those conditions after
the press reported on the
outage, sparking several days
of protests outside the prison,
the electeds alleged in their
letter to Horowitz.
“Instead of offering proactive
solutions and executing
its emergency plan, MDC
Brooklyn failed in its duties
until public pressure and demands
for answers reached a
tipping point,” they wrote.
The Feds’ investigations
must also provide more details
about inmates’ treatment during
the outage — when prison
staff allegedly barred them
from receiving medical care,
clean clothes, and hot meals on
some of the coldest days of the
year — and uncover whether
contractors worked as quickly
as possible to restore power
sooner than it came back on
Feb. 3, the pols wrote.
And the letter to the Prisons
Bureau additionally demanded
responses to seven
multi-part questions about the
prison’s infrastructure, allegations
against its staffers,
why management barred the
incarcerated men from meeting
with their lawyers, and
how the agency would “reestablish
the community’s
trust” and prevent similar incidents
in the future.
The Justice Department
announced its investigations
of the Metropolitan Detention
Center two days after a group
of lawyers sued the Feds and
the prison’s warden on Feb. 4
for violating the inmates’ constitutional
rights during the
power loss , and a day after a
Prisons Bureau rep told this
newspaper that heat “was operational
despite the electrical
outage.”
The rep, however, did not
respond to repeated inquiries
about the bureau’s defi nition
of “operational,” and if prison
staffers were manually turning
down the heat.
Prisons Bureau reps also
did not immediately respond
when asked if its leaders will
publicly answer the questions
the pols posed in their letters.
NO JUSTICE, NO HEAT: The weeklong
power outage sparked a series
of protests outside the facility.
File photo by Trey Pentecost
The Schneps Media team
donned crimson on Feb. 1 to
“Go Red” for the American
Heart Association’s Go Red For
Women campaign, which raises
awareness about heart disease
and stroke in women. New
Yorkers donned the bold hue
that day and donated to the Association’s
campaign to spread
the message that cardiovascular
disease is the number one
killer of women in the United
States. Photo by Colin Mixson
A cold case in Sunset Park
Feds investigating their Brooklyn prison after week-long power outage
/thebushwickstarr.org
link
link
link
/www.thebushwickstarr.org
link
link
link