I was scanning an article about Angola, which was accompanied by a map, and I noticed the exclave of Cabinda. The breakup of the Soviet Union and its satellites has created several exclaves, including the Dubrovnik region of Croatia. But the world's largest exclave is in North America, even if we hardly ever think of it as such.

posted: 1:00:17 PM  

Teenaged Justin Hammond (played masterfully by Mark Sullivan) is the sensible center of this blackly funny satire of America's obsession with "death porn" and the power of positive cooptation. Which is saying something, since Justin has spent the middle three years of his adolescence abusing substances as an inadequate means of mourning his mother, who was killed in a sensational murder by a schizophrenic gardener. As a foil to the earnestness of the adults in his life—an earnestness that is wholly deluded when it isn't calculatingly cynical—Justin explains irony to his pothead mother in a prologue scene, gives lessons to his father on flirting, and finds an underaged way to get a drink in a bar when the barback's attention is elsewhere. While Justin's father spins tragedy into a fat book deal, encouraged by a television producer who never met a sorrow he couldn't misappropriate (sorry, "reclaim"), Justin looks for his own way to grieve, in this post-9/11, post-Katrina landscape.

Gionfriddo has seen the televised tragedy machine from the inside; she currently writes for one of the Law & Order serials. Her smart script is punctuated by articulate groans. Director Lee Mikeska Gardner has her actors fully explore the acting space, with scenes played on the floor, on (improbably wheeled) talk show chairs, or sitting on the back of a sofa. Michael Willis has a fine second act turn as a portly, epicene pornographer.

posted: 12:48:07 PM