Earlier: The playwright, whose politics have veered right in recent years (apparently, it's hard to tell at times), has written a piece for the Theater section of the NYT coming tomorrow, about his new play, The Anarchist. It stars Patti LuPone as an aging convict and the wonderful Debra Winger as her former jailer. His essay opens with Bill Ayers, and then moves along. Reading Mamet, the play seems to have been inspired by the infamous "Brinks Kilings" of 1981--a botched robbery by the Black Liberation Army and members of the Weather Underground that ended in the deaths of two state troopers.
Now, as it happens, I live about a mile from where this took place and every autumn they hold a big ceremony around the monuments to the dead just off a New York State Thruway ramp. So I've kept up with the case, the release and non-release of prisoners. Mamet's take seems interesting: Is it right to keep a perpetrator in prison because of her political views--when she no doubt would have been paroled by now if it was a normal case?
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New York State should finally release all of the 1981 Brink's case defendants that it still has locked up--who were tried, in a legally irregular fasion, before a jury panel of anonymous juror and without being present, at times, in the courtroom; and--in violation of international law--who were not treated as political prisoners and p.o.w.s.
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