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Friday, July 04, 2008 21:09 GMT

Stories by Lucy Komisar

Lucy Komisar is a New York-based investigative journalist. She writes for IPS on corruption, offshore banking and corporate secrecy, as well as regular theatre reviews.

Her chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in the new book "A Game as Old as Empire", just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).

THEATRE-US: Welcome to the Machine
by Lucy Komisar*
'The Adding Machine' (1923) and 'Top Girls' (1983) are separated by 60 years, but both used stylised techniques to portray workers as willing slaves of capitalism. That system has destroyed them, but they haven't the consciousness to know it. And they absorb attitudes that are racist and sexist.

THEATRE-US: The Year the War Came Home
by Lucy Komisar*
On this 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that for the United States was the apogee of opposition to the war in Vietnam, two new Off Broadway plays explore divergent ways that U.S. citizens protested -- and ponder the best way to contest a senseless war.

THEATRE-US: The Houswife's Lament
by Lucy Komisar*
Since the 1950s, views in the United States have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women -- or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages.

THEATRE-US: Something Wicked This Way Comes
by Lucy Komisar
It's not surprising that ethics -- or more precisely, a lack thereof -- has taken centre stage during this New York theatre season. Playwrights have trained their sights on the morally challenged West, hoping perhaps to get theatregoers to muse on the connections between public and private evil.

THEATRE-US: Play Dissects Politics of Fighting Repression
by Lucy Komisar
Jiri Dienstbier had been a reform Communist and radio journalist and commentator during the 1968 'Prague Spring'. He'd lost his job when he spoke out on the air against the Soviet military intervention. After he helped found the Czech human rights group, Charter 77, he spent three years in prison and then had to work as a boiler technician in the subway.

THEATRE-US: Play Shows West's Moral Failures in Rwanda
by Lucy Komisar*
As the 1994 genocide in Rwanda slips into the dark hole of history, the U.S. playwright J.T. Rogers's 'The Overwhelming' reminds one how it happened and how both the 'moral', the complicit and the cynical in the West were present in the killing fields.

PERU: US Gov't Document Links García to 1980s Death Squads
by Lucy Komisar*
There is irony in the recent announcement by Peru's President Alan García that he would publish the names of 1,800 'freed terrorists', so that people might recognise and report them if they were participating in anti-state conspiracies. His list includes people imprisoned on false charges or never convicted or sentenced.

THEATRE-US: Strong Women Storm Broadway
by Lucy Komisar*
New York stages are filled with strong women these days, and while it might be expected in serious drama, they are also asserting themselves forcefully in musicals and classic comedy -- forms that speak to the popular culture.

THEATRE-US: Palestinian Martyrs and Traitors
by Lucy Komisar*
In a new play by a Palestinian-American woman, two characters say in unison: 'Oppression is like a coin maker. You put in human beings, press the right buttons and watch them get squeezed, shrunk, flattened till they take the slim shape of a two-faced coin, one side is a martyr, the other a traitor. All the possibilities of a life get reduced to those paltry two.'

CORRUPTION: Another Lead in Siemens Bribery Probe?
by Lucy Komisar
U.S. officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with prosecutors in Munich this week regarding the 1.3-billion-dollar bribe fund run by Siemens, the German multinational technology company.

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