Global

It’s 10 p.m. at Montrose Harbor in Chicago. Kiko and Tamar help me step from the dock into the wobbly rowboat. Kiko rows us out to the Golden Rule and I climb aboard in wonder. Oh my God! This is it – the 30-foot, anti-nuke sailboat with a history going back almost seven decades . . . back to the era of atmospheric nuclear testing and the Cold War at its simmering height.

The Golden Rule: “Floating for sanity in an insane world.”

From its very onset, Israel has constructed a brand for itself, a powerful gimmick that was predicated on two main pillars: democracy and stability. 

The main target audience for this brand has been powerful Western states that wielded disproportionate political, economic and military powers. 

These Western governments, along with their influential mainstream corporate media, did their part, by polishing Israel's image - as most democratic and most stable - while tarnishing that of their Arab and Palestinian enemies - or anyone else who dared criticize Israel. 

It mattered little whether Israel was truly a beacon of democracy and stability because these terms are often conjured up and used to conveniently fit the interest of those in power. 

One of the very best things a work of art can do is to give the voiceless a public voice in
order to be heard. And award-winning playwright Preston Choi does that, loud and clear,
in his great new This is Not a True Story. In this thought provoking, highly entertaining
one-act play the characters of Cio-Cio-San (here called CioCio and played by Julia Cho)
from Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 Japan-set opera Madame Butterfly, Kim (Zandi De Jesus)
from the 1989 musical Miss Saigon, and the real-life Takako Konishi (Rosie Narasaki –
more below on Konishi, who has a bizarre tie-in to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 movie
Fargo) collide with one another, and especially in CioCio and Kim’s cases, with their
Caucasian creators. Hilarity, poignancy and above all, insight into the damage that racial
stereotyping causes ensues.
Kim, of course, is based on the Italian composer Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San in the adaptation
of Madame Butterfly that’s updated and reset in Vietnam in 1975 in Miss Saigon, with
music by Frenchman Claude-Michel Schönberg, book by Tunisian-born Alain Boublil
and Schönberg, lyrics by Boublil and Wisconsin-born Richard Maltby Jr. Note that while