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If your boss or cause lost last night, don’t fret—there’s plenty of arty stuff to take in during your newfound free agency, at least until our new boss Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, turns us into Maryland. One city, babe.
Our theater critic Trey Graham reviews the Washington State Guild’s new production Darwin in Malibu, Crispin Whittell‘s transplant of Charles Darwin and the development of evolutionary theory from Victorian England to a 20th-century California beach. Graham lauds it for “[confronting] the audience with the notion that we all live in a kind of purgatory: unable to unknow what we know courtesy of Darwin and his scientific heirs.”
If you’re into creepy photographs, the Columbia Heights bar/gallery Social has a display up of work by the students of longtime WaPo photography critic Frank Van Riper and his wife Judith Goodman.
At the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last weekend, while Jonathan L. Fischer was eking his way through the overstuffed National Gallery of Art, I encountered a number of handmade signs that protested the decline in writing standards brought on by a culture of poorly-informed populism. From the looks of Nicholas Delbanco‘s WaPo takedown of Newt Gingrich‘s new work of historical fiction Valley Forge is laden “with so many lapses that I need to growl a little” and “time after time, the language here slides into imprecision.”
Also from the copy desk, Jon Lackman of Slate ponders why all those signs hoisted by tea partiers and strewn around Capitol Hill after their latest protest concludes are written with every noun capitalized. Could be a Revolutionary-era throwback. Could be stupidity. Or because that’s how the Germans do it.