“Despite it being in English translation, every performance of the play Rituals this month played to a full house of people eager to see Wannous’s ribald skewering of official sanctimony and social rigidity.”
Watch scene from Rituals of Signs and Transformations
“The play, which is performed in Arabic with an English translation by Robert Myers and Nada Saab flashed above the set, opens with two brothers — Majid and Hamid — in the bathhouse, scrubbing each other and bantering over family matters.” Watch scene from Baghdadi Bath
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“In writing Fixin’ to Die, Myers found Atwater’s confessions and regrets as compelling as the perplexing life that led to them. ‘His act of contrition at the end, however you want to interpret it, was sort of a cry of humanity,’ the playwright says. “That on some very basic level, we’re human beings.’”
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“Myers’s plays might be described as archival, in that they incorporate not just the facts of historical events, but the very language of historical documents. Like many of Sayles’s films, these plays address themselves explicitly to political questions.”
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“The Theater in the Square, a former cotton warehouse 300 yards from Mary Phagan’s grave, chose the play The Lynching of Leo Frank, by Robert Myers, to open its 19th season, in keeping with a philosophy to showcase local themes.”
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“What is rotting in every scene of Robert Myers’s taut, engrossing biographical monodrama is the American body politic itself, poisoned by image makers more intent on concocting scabrous myths about their opponents than in invigorating political discourse.”
Read article“In Myer’s intelligent, rigorously unsentimental approach, we never see these twists coming. He sees the world of 1913 as a kind of nightmarish Escher drawing, a closed system where bigotry seals off all exits.”
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“Robert Myers’ riveting new drama, The Lynching of Leo Frank, takes off from a case history that, even in bare factual outline, is compelling enough.”
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“Myers, who is author of several other works inspired by history, including “Lee Atwater: Fixin’ To Die” and “Dead of Night: The Execution of Fred Hampton” (premiered by Pegasus in February), wrote his version of the Leo Frank story in 1984, his first effort at playwrighting.”
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“Myers focuses on William O’Neal, the FBI informer who infiltrated the Panthers and whose reports to his white supervising agent enabled Hanrahan’s men to enact their deadly plan. Myers paints O’Neal as a complex figure who seeks the respect of both Hampton and the FBI.”
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“We’re talking about a political figure who was cut down,” says Robert Myers, the playwright who has written “Dead of Night.” “Hampton was an absolutely courageous figure. I don’t think he had one iota of doubt about what potentially was in store for him…”
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“When Robert Myers refers to Mesopotamia — the title of his new play, a staged reading of which will be held Oct. 21-22 at the Whitney Humanities Center — he’s not joking around.”
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“I’m sorry about many things I did,” says the character from his hospital bed. “You reach a point where you don’t hate anyone. You love everyone. Honestly.”
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“At one point in Fixin’ to Die, Atwater says, “Lemme tell you something about my attitude towards lying,” then launches into a hilariously bombastic non sequitur that winds up with the declamation “Because if you ever corrupt yourself on lying or stealing, then Katie bar the door!”
Continue reading“But the playwright Robert Myers submits just enough evidence in this solidly built, well-paced, 75-minute melodrama to make his persuasive dramatic case: Atwater’s ascension as the symbolic occasion for the final burial of idealism in American politics.”
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“Atwater still made his mark – not only because he played blues guitar at a 1988 inaugural ball but also because his ruthless, nihilistic approach to campaigning transformed dirty politics into an art form.”
Continue reading“This acclaimed one-man play explores the strategems, cynicism and passion brought to politics by Lee Atwater, self-styled master of negative campaigning and the fun-lovin’ Dixie dude equally at home in the world of delta blues and “dirty tricks” political strategists.”
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“The newly ambiguous Atwater became, at his expiration, a complex political figure and ripe content for a play. “Fixin’ to Die, a one-man show by Robert Myers, is the result…”
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“Playwright Robert Myers claims to have been “a political campaign watcher from the age of 5, an odd preoccupation for a child, but one that paid off later in life.”
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“Playing to nearly full houses in the 125 seat theater, before a fair representation from political campaigns, the Atwater play is on a weeklong run…”
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