Hasta La Gadget!

London–What can ordinarily be objectionable about Ivo van Hove’s too often juvenile look-at-me directing is that he thinks it’s innovative to play up a script’s subtext. That, of course, is just what writers don’t want done. It’s called “subtext,” for the blaring reason it’s meant to remain sub.

For his highly effective and somewhat radical view of Arthur Miller’s View From the Bridge–at Wyndham’s after its sell-out Young Vic stay–he’s done something different, however. Knowing that Miller shaped it as a contemporary Greek tragedy, he presents it as such. Resume breathing: He doesn’t go so far as masks.

But he uses no conventional set. Rather, he’s had his regular designer Jan Versweyveld construct a plain square playing area surrounded by a low, transparent wall fitted within a high black box. He places part of the audience to the right and left of the box, giving the loose impression of an ancient theater.

More than that, and, okay, more in line with the subtext-revealing so dear to van Hove’s directing heart, he takes the notion of boxing–which going-haywire longshoreman Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) introduces two-thirds of the way through the now 155-minute intermissionless version–and implies that the characters, often sitting in one or more of the four corners, are competitors in a ring.

Stripped to its bare bones in this manner, the play does acquire the twist he suggests in a program note that Miller would appreciate were he to living today. (Where he gets off making this brash assumption beats me.) The reason his bold approach works, of course, is that the acting is in line with the naturalism Miller did bank on. The point, it should be needless to say, is that all plays worth their salt–and A View From the Bridge is nothing if not salty–should work without benefit of set and other accouterments.

Van Hove’s only substantial departures from Miller are the beginning and end. At the start, when black walls are slowly raised and lawyer/Greek chorus Alfieri (Michael Gould) begins his ominous discourse, Eddie and pal/co-worker Louis (Richard Hansell) are showering–with the water conjuring a baptismal cleansing as it disappears down a drain on the floor. About the finish, I won’t say more than it’s a can’t-look-at-can’t-turn-away-from coup de theatre somewhat the obverse of the opening image.

The story is a painful one. It’s Eddie’s undoing when wife Beatrice (Nicola Walker; I saw understudy Samantha Coughlan) gives shelter to illegal immigrant relatives. They’re quietly brooding Marco (Emun Elliott) and eager young and blond Rodolpho (Luke Norris). Eddie and Beatrice’s young ward Catherine (Phoebe Fox) fall for each other, and the development unhinges Eddie, who has eyes for Catherine but won’t cop to it.

While too much obvious religious music underscores just about all the action–Tom Gibbons supplies it, undoubtedly because van Hove insisted–the acting initially seems turgid but kicks in as tragedy mounts. Exempt from any negative criticism, though, is Strong. From the get-go, he clearly knows exactly what Eddie Carbone is about. Talk about naturalistic acting, here it is in full force. Whereas other cast members are filling their roles well, Strong’s Eddie just inexorably is who he is.
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While Miller is looking of the tragedies occurring in the shadow of a bridge over a lower-class Brooklyn neighborhood, playwright David Hare and director Rufus Norris (soon to take over National Theatre reins from Nicholas Hytner) are focusing a close-up camera on the impoverished Annawadi area in the shadow of the Mumbai airport. Their Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a sprawling adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo’s unflinching Random House book bearing the same title. (The production will be broadcast live from the National on March 12.)

By the way, I don’t use the popular adjective “sprawling” simply to describe the physical layout on the hugely accommodating Olivier stage. Yes, it certainly is that from the instant the play begins, and even before. As the audience enters, the site is a desolate area at the back of which are a series of battered and graffiti-laden walls designer Katrina Lindsay has provided.

In front of the walls the stage is littered with refuse, and in a burst of choreographed frenzy a group of actors race around collecting the items and stuffing them in the plastic bags they carry. This is Hare and Norris instantly making manifest the only source of income the indigenous citizens have,

It’s quickly explained that the frantic crowd divides into two groups: pickers, who go about this dirty business honestly, and thieves, who break into prohibited areas to gather items, like metal scraps, that fetch more money when turned into dealers.

Abdul Husain (Shane Zaza) is one such dealer. It’s his story and the story of his family as they become caught in a fatal clash with another family that serves as the primary plot. It’s through this event that Boo at first and now Hare and Norris spread the news about an ignored population. Think of it as an elaboration on the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.

Working with a scale on which he weighs the bits and pieces brought him, Abdul is relatively richer than those around him. It’s a position his aggressive mother Zehrunisa (Meera Syal) exploits. One of her victims is crippled tenant Fatima Shaikh (Thusitha Jayasundera), who, as the tale unfolds, attempts suicide by setting herself on fire. Her plan is to blame the Husains for driving her to such an extreme.

In a not especially subtle ploy, Abdul’s oversized scale is often hoisted above him, thereby hanging as a reminder of the scales of justice. And justice for the poor Annawadi people is the major theme here. Will the Husains–Abdul, his father Karma (Vincent Ebrahim) and sister (Anjli Mohindra) are all eventually arrested and maltreated–meet a just end. Will anyone in a system shown systematically as blatantly corrupt meet a just end?

But back to that sense of a sprawling piece of circus-y work. It’s the textual sprawl getting to Boo’s point that both draws spectators to the production and distances them. Often the subsidiary stories threaten to undermine the production’s overall effect. Often director Norris’s love of staging things like parades and other festivities suggests that a certain amount of self-indulgence has taken over.

Nevertheless, the ensemble acting is astonishing. Even more compelling is the extended glimpse of a too often dismissed subculture. That’s what overrides any objections here.

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined on Tuesday an invitation to meet with U.S. Senate Democrats during his trip to Washington next week.

“Though I greatly appreciate your kind invitation to meet with Democratic Senators, I believe that doing so at this time could compound the misperception of partisanship regarding my upcoming visit,” Netanyahu wrote in a letter to Senators Richard Durbin and Dianne Feinstein obtained by Reuters.

Durbin and Feinstein, two senior Senate Democrats, invited Netanyahu to a closed-door meeting with Democratic senators in a letter on Monday, warning that making U.S.-Israeli relations a partisan political issue could have “lasting repercussions.”

Republican congressional leaders broke diplomatic protocol by consulting neither the White House nor Democrats in Congress before inviting Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of the House of Representatives and Senate.

Netanyahu has faced criticism at home and abroad for his decision to address the U.S. Congress two weeks before Israeli elections and at a sensitive point in international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

In his letter, Netanyahu said he agreed “wholeheartedly” that strong ties between the United States and Israel have been built on bipartisan support. “I also fully understand the importance of bipartisan support for ensuring that our alliance remains strong in the future,” he wrote.

He expressed appreciation for the opportunity to address lawmakers from both parties on Tuesday and said he regretted that the invitation has been perceived by some as partisan.

“I can assure you my sole intention in accepting it was to voice Israel’s grave concerns about a potential nuclear agreement with Iran that could threaten the survival of my country,” Netanyahu wrote.

He said he would be glad to address a bipartisan meeting of senators during a future visit to Washington.

Spokesmen for Durbin and Feinstein could not immediately be reached for comment. (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

LONDON–For a self-professed Christian who has long used the dangling cross he wears around his neck as a tool to define his public persona, it comes as little surprise that Russian President Vladimir Putin would make such a public showing out of his belief in original sin. But, it turns out that the version of original sin that Putin likes best isn’t the religious version, but a political one.

In the Russian strongman’s favorite telling, Western nations promised a teetering Soviet Union on the verge of collapse in 1990 that if Moscow agreed to remove Soviet troops from East Germany, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would vow to never expand further east than Berlin. But then, as the story goes, the West broke its word almost immediately and sought to humiliate Russia, going so far as to attempt the expansion of NATO and the European Union to Russian borders. So naturally, in the heroic Putin narrative, Russian troops were forced to invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to protect its homeland against the aggressive actions of the United States and its European allies.

As Harvard historian Mary Elise Sarotte has proven, this is a complete and utter fairy tale. While there was some discussion 25 years ago this month between then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl about whether an integrated Germany could exist as a half-NATO nation or whether the West should accede to Moscow’s hope that NATO would never expand to eastern Europe, it was roundly rejected.

The most damning rebuff to the Putin narrative came in an interview with Wossiskaya Gazeta and Russia Beyond the Headlines last October 15th, when an interviewee familiar with the negotiations in 1990-91 said, “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”

The speaker? None other than former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev himself.

Yet, as Putin continues to spin the myth of humiliation to justify Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine, some Western observers are convinced that Russia is winning the war of words. Some suggest that Putin’s actions are a sign of Russia’s renewed strength while others worry that the former KGB operative is in the driver’s seat in Europe, splitting the NATO alliance and undermining the EU while fueling a new Cold War. However the situation in Ukraine is resolved, many seem resigned to the fact that Russia will never embrace the West, which should instead prepare itself for a long twilight struggle.

There is no question that the situation with Russia right now is dangerous. But the pundits who think that Russia has the upper hand are mistaken. It’s a misreading of history to believe that Europe, the U.S. and Russia are destined to be long-term adversaries. After all, the world didn’t endure five decades of the Cold War just so we could slip back into a Cold War posture at the first sign of trouble.

The situation in Ukraine isn’t about Russia’s strength; it’s about Russia’s weakness. After all, what did Putin do? He sent members of the Russian army, which spends $78 billion a year to Ukraine’s $1.6 billion, across his own peaceful border to start a local war in the last country in Eastern Europe that was threatening to abandon Russia and turn to the West. As many have written, his real fear isn’t to have a NATO-aligned Ukraine on its border, but a prosperous, Democratic Ukraine on its border, showing Russians a shining example of what life could like with the West.

Meanwhile, Russia’s economy just got downgraded to junk status. Inflation is in double digits. One in five banks are reportedly on the verge of collapse. The value of the ruble has fallen 50% against the dollar. The president of Russia’s regional banking association is warning that the country will soon face a wave of bankruptcies. And Russia’s own central bank is cautioning that the economy will shrink as much as 4.7 percent if oil prices don’t climb above $60 a barrel. There is little question that Western sanctions imposed over Ukraine are punishing the Russian people harder than ever, and they have less patience with the former KGB agents in positions of power who continue to get rich while the rest of the country suffers.

Then, there is the head of Russia’s main state news agency, Dmitry Kiselev, who warned this month that while the Soviet Union pledged never to use nuclear weapons first, Russia’s current military no longer recognizes that limitation. Now, ask yourself this: does a country that really feels strong about itself talk openly about its nuclear arsenal? After all, not even a weak, isolated Muslim nation like Pakistan brags about its nukes.

Putin knows that the West could completely collapse the Russian economy within months. All it would take is to act on the suggestion made by the United Kingdom last August that Russia be cut completely out of the international payment system, known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. Russia relies almost entirely on the Belgium-based system to process domestic and international payments. Fear of such a move is so great that one of Russia’s top bankers warned that it would be like declaring war, while Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev pledged that Russia’s response “would know no limits.”

And yet, despite all of this, Russia is still on track to boost its defense spending by 30 percent in 2015, as part of a long-planned upgrade of the Russian military. Putin’s greatest critics have long charged that he hopes to create a union of former Soviet states – but dramatically boosting military spending while the country rots from within didn’t work out so well the first time, and there is little reason to believe that it will work now, either.

Instead, the West should recognize this for what it is: a desperate play to fan the flames of Russian nationalism by a President who has no other answers. And there is absolutely no reason why the U.S. should let him go down this road without trying to stop it.

It may seem like a naïve hope at this point, but as geopolitical analyst Robert Kaplan has written, Putin has no respect for Europe – only America. And it must be America that leads. The U.S. should take a velvet and hammer approach.

On one hand, it should intensify sanctions that squeeze Russia’s ability to do business, crack down on Russian money laundering, use U.S. natural gas to reduce the EU’s dependence on Russia, and lead an all-out international effort to boost aid to Ukraine–all while keeping one finger on the SWIFT trigger.

On the other hand, the White House should privately reach out to Putin. It should affirm Russia’s proud history, acknowledge that expanding NATO to Ukraine–with its 1,000 year association with Russia–was a bridge too far, and offer to help restart Russia’s embrace of democratic reform. It should accept Putin’s idea of a “greater Europe from Dublin to Vladivostok,” invite Russia to join NATO on a special membership track, and work with Moscow to help it begin to adopt a version of NATO’s standards for democracy and transparency.

For good measure, we might remind Russia that if it continues to isolate itself by reclaiming its historic territories, there will likely be nobody there in the future when China decides it wants Siberia back and reclaims the vast energy-rich territory it was forced to cede to Russia in 1860. Once a precedent is established, there is no telling where it might lead.

If Putin really believes in the messages of hope and forgiveness embodied by that cross hanging from his neck, he’ll pull back from his Ukrainian folly and open his eyes to the better future that integration with the West can bring to his people. Now is not the time for the U.S. and Europe to give up on Russia. Now is the time for the West to do everything in its power to help Russia realize its vast potential.

Stanley A. Weiss, a global mining executive and founder of Washington-based Business Executives for National Security, has been widely published on domestic and international issues for three decades.

WASHINGTON — Seven medical groups representing most U.S. physicians are seeking to recast gun-related casualties as a public health crisis, pointing to data that blames firearms for 33,000 U.S. deaths and more than double that many injuries in 2013.

The coalition, which also includes the American Bar Association and the American Public Health Association, issued a “call to action” Tuesday that implores the medical community to study deaths and injuries caused by firearms without “political influence or restriction.”

The appeal is made in an editorial and a new study, both published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and echoes a similar call to physicians two years ago that the groups say went largely unheeded due to political forces. This time, the medical societies outline recommendations to curtail gun violence, such as eliminating “gag orders” that bar physicians from discussing gun ownership with patients, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and advancing universal background checks.

“It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns — the result is the same: a public health crisis,” Dr. Darren Taichman, the journal’s executive editor, wrote on behalf of the editorial board.

Citing other endemics such as polio and Ebola, the editorial points out that most public health crises have been either vanquished or reduced due to scientific training and monitoring. “But it seems to stop when it comes to firearm injury. Why?” it asks.

The editorial says politicians are, in many ways, to blame. After the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the Senate failed to expand background checks despite overwhelming public support. And last year, the National Rifle Association almost derailed the confirmation of Dr. Vivek Murthy, President Barack Obama’s pick for surgeon general, after he criticized lawmakers for cowering to special interests and not treating gun violence as a public health issue.

Although proponents of stricter gun laws continue to face an uphill battle, the Annals editors encouraged health professionals to keep pressure on Congress and state legislatures by joining the call to action and sending letters to elected officials.

“Have we done our jobs? Can we? The answers are no and maybe: No, we have not sufficiently reduced the firearm-related harms our patients suffer, but maybe we can, if we demand the resources and freedom to do so,” they wrote.

The medical groups backing the call to action are: American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Emergency Physicians, American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American College of Physicians, American College of Surgeons, and American Psychiatric Association.

In a Tuesday interview with HuffPost Live, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) discussed how the high cost of the war on drugs prevents law enforcement agencies from getting the funds they need to fight other crimes.

Booker sat down with HuffPost’s Ryan Grim to discuss criminal justice reform and his push for supporters to read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Pointing to politicians like Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R), who has worked to reduce his state’s prison population by changing the way nonviolent offenders are sentenced, Booker said criminal justice reform “is an issue that we all can agree on.”

“You shouldn’t be letting this bureaucracy grow so big,” Booker said. “It’s chewing up taxpayer dollars, squeezing out money. Would you rather have a nonviolent drug offender with a bunch of marijuana cost us a million dollars for a high mandatory minimum … or would you rather be able to hire two more investigators to investigate insurance fraud? To investigate other white collar crimes that are costing society? Or to protect us against terrorism?”

He continued, “We’re spending money in the wrong place as a society if we really want to stop the kind of crime that threatens and undermines our economy and our safety.”

Noting that the Drug Enforcement Administration has the resources, Grim said that federal drug enforcement agents may better serve the public by investigating white collar criminals.

“Right now we have a Drug Enforcement Administration which is extraordinarily good at tracking money globally,” Grim said. “Have you ever thought about telling the DEA, ‘Look, we’re not going to put you out of business, we’re just going to put you somewhere else?'”

“I love when Second Amendment and pro-gun folks say, ‘We have enough gun [laws],’ enforce the laws that we have,'” Booker said. “And I actually say, you know what you’re right. We don’t actually enforce the laws that we have well because we have anemic ATF group because they don’t get the funding they need. Why? Because we’re spending so much money funding other agencies prosecuting the drug war.”

“So this is an area that should, for all of us who want to be diligent with the use of taxpayer funds and the returns we get for our economy, should begin to agree that we’ve gone way off the right path,” Booker said.

Watch the clip from HuffPost Live above.