Columbia City Paper

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Bar none, the best place to watch a show in this town is at the
University of South Carolina Lab Theatre.  Think theater Fight Club, a
concrete space so pounding and intimate you can practically smell an
actor’s breath. And if you’re in the front row during an intense scene,
you’re likely to get sprayed with thespian spit or sweat.
The first show I saw in Columbia was “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” in
the USC black box.  It was electrifying—and this was before efforts to
make the space look less like a slaughterhouse rinsing station and more
like a playhouse.  (Although, the bathrooms still resemble something
out of one of the “Saw” movies.)  It’s always peeved me that every
theater-reviewing rag in town ignores this space.  Not only do you get
to see the grittiest plays produced anywhere in Columbia for less than
the price of a Whopper and fries, but you support student actors and
directors by doing so.
The final show of the 2009 USC Lab season is “Iphigenia and Other
Daughters,” written by Ellen McLaughlin, better known for her portrayal
as the angel is Tony Kushner’s millennial epic “Angels in America” than
for any of her classical-themed plays.  “Iphigenia,” in McLaughlin’s
own words, “adapts Euripides’ ‘Iphigenia in Aulis,’ Sophocles’
‘Electra,’ and Euripides’ ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’ in succession to create
what [I call] in the program notes ‘a meditation on feminism.’”  But
that quote is likely to send most theatergoers running for the nearest
mindless Andrew Lloyd Webber production, so ignore it.  Instead, spend
five minutes surfing Wikipedia to catch up on the Classical literature
you missed while getting your MBA.  Or, if you prefer, read this
six-sentence summary of the 13th century BCE:

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Greenville native, Carl Blair, presents abstract paintings and wooden sculptures in his brand new “Flora & Fauna” exhibition at if ART Gallery. Imagination mixes with wild color to produce this extraordinary collection by an artist who only discovered his color-blindness in college. After he began to study art he started wearing a red contact lens in his left eye to help to distinguish colors. While colors are obviously integral to painting, so, too, are dynamism and passion. Blair has both.  The colorful waves and thick lines blend effortlessly to create landscapes that are not detail-focused, but centered around color and shape.
Blair refers to his style as neither realistic nor abstract. “I refer to my work as visual poetry,” he says.

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UPDATE: What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan?

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