As someone who had the great fortune of learning the power of theatre from the late, great Stella Adler, I am happy to see activists use theatre to raise consciousness in America in these troubled times. Stella imparted a legacy to her students, born of the influences of her father, Jacob Adler, the illustrious star of the Yiddish Theatre, and her husband, Harold Clurman, who founded the famed Group Theatre that made so much "noise" in the late 30s with Clifford Odet's play, "Waiting for Lefty," and which spawned a vibrant artistic movement through The Actors Studio that continues to exert a powerful influence on film and theatre artists to this day.
It is because of this legacy, and knowing in my blood and soul how important it is, that I'm especially pleased to learn that the Academy Award winning actor, Timothy Robbins, is keeping the ideal of socially and politically conscious theatre alive in America with the film version of his anti-Bush play, "Embedded/Live."
"Embedded" was born as a play in a 30-seat theatre in Los Angeles in July 2003 and has been playing to audiences for the past year in LA and New York.The movie is the film of an actual performance of the play, in places intercut with scenes of the destruction of war and its casualties.
The major news organisations are bitterly attacked in the play for slavishly following the US military's official line in their reports from correspondents embedded with soldiers in Iraq.
In his research for the play, Robbins said he delved into stories from the Guardian and Independent newspapers in Britain which "reported entirely different stories than the ones we were seeing in the United States".
Britain may currently have more journalistic integrity in its media, "but you should be careful because I believe there's an effort to send your journalistic integrity down the same road as ours went," he told a press conference in Venice.
"That has to do with who owns -- and how many own -- a newspaper, or media outlets that can inform opinion."
At one point, he says, the danger is that "debate stops and becomes a rhetoric, it becomes propaganda".
Robbins, who won an Oscar for Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" and a best actor award at Cannes for Robert Altman's "The Player", has been "doing theatre" since the age of 12, and later worked for a theatre company in New York before turning to film.
"For me its a place where I can learn. Go back to school. Challenge myself. Doing work without asking permission, I can set my own agenda. I don't have to raise millions and millions of dollars" for a film.
"Embedded/Live" will shortly begin an eight-state tour of small town America, where support for the war was at its greatest, before the bodies of almost 1,000 US soldiers began coming home. Yahoo News