Many writers, musicians, and artists got their start in the office — the British novelist Anthony Trollope worked for the postal service and composer Charles Ives was a full-time insurance agent. Judith Kampfner looked into the workaday lives of some of these artists and how it fuels their creativity outside the office.

Britain’s most enigmatic artistic duo met at art school in 1967 and have been together ever since. They live and work in London's East End, named their house "Art for All," and declared themselves "living sculptures." In their large colorful multi-panel pictures they either wear spotless business suits or they appear naked. They are always together. Could Gilbert & George really be as inseparable as they appear? Judith Kampfner went to their house and studio in Spitalfields to find out.

Home furnishings catalogs have evolved over the past couple of decades into glossy, sumptuous celebrations of domestic life (minus the mess). They're a far cry from the fuzzy line drawings of a Sears catalog at the turn of the last century. But Judith Kampfner says that some of the eye popping splendor in current catalogs begins much longer ago than that: with the 17th century paintings of Dutch Still Life masters.

Mention a movie about the Korean War to Americans and they probably think of M*A*S*H.  But while the most expensive film out of Korea is about the Korean war -its not about the experience of the US Army but the hardships of Korean fighting men and the civilian population.   For the almost 200,000 Korean Americans living in the New York area -the film is opening a crucial chapter in their history. WNYC's Judith Kampfner reports.

Kampfner

A brother grips a brother by the throat. A once handsome athletic soldier has become a bestial killer.

Once he had tried to make a deal with his South Korean general. He would volunteer for every military challenge if his brother was kept out of the fighting. The general betrays him. He goes over to the North Korean side and the day comes when he encounters his brother in a battle.

Kampfner

Like Saving Private Ryan - the film Tae Guk Gi is fiction but it illuminates history. The brothers are a metaphor for a civil war which got caught in the Cold war and divided Korea into the communist north and democratic south.

The director Kang Je - gyu said he wanted to show the impact of a conflict in which it is estimated two million Koreans died.  

Kang Je gyu

Previous films always tired to portray who was right and who started the war but I tried to show the tragic and emotional side and how it reflected peoples' lives today. I think that's what made the film successful

Kampfner:

I in every 3 South Koreans have seen the film - the audiences ranged from ages 10 to 70.  The actors are South Korean soap opera stars and one is popular singer. That was a draw for young cinema goers. By the time it hit neighborhood cinemas in America , the reviews from Korea and Japan ensured that this would be a must see film within the Korean American community. Student Adrian Hong thought his contemporaries would be go to see Korean history delivered in the accessible form of an action movie

Adrian

Well I think it helps Korean Americans to first see their own identity within a context they can understand.. whey you see people in western dress fighting just like in Saving Private Ryan they identify better it brings it home.. it legitimizes their identity.

Laura Kim

I actually watched the movie with my parents

Kampfner:

Laura Kim is a first generation Korean American aged 23 living in New Jersey .

Laura Kim:

I sat in the middle of both of them and intermittently, they would keep nudging me saying this is where our family fled - this village and this is where your uncle so and so was enlisted.

Kampfner:

There's a scene early in the film where the older brother starts a fist fight with soldiers who are trying to conscript his brother.

There were many moments in Tae Guk Gi which brought back the past and verified history said Laura's mother Insook Kim.   

Insook

While I was watching this movie I remember my brother telling me about this story, he was 21, at the time. One day the town council called 1200 college students to the school yard and none of them knew what that was about and there were slogans and posters everywhere and so then they knew they have to go to war. And they were not even trained so then they walk miles and miles and march to the North.

Kampfner

For director Kang Je-gyu, telling the story of the forced conscription meant making the film without the cooperation of the South Korean military. The graphic nature of the movie,  the visual details of the terrible medical conditions, chaos and the inclusion of  South Korean atrocities  has   shocked many movie goers including  Insook Kin's brother, a war veteran in South Korea . 

Insook

 He saw it but he didn't like it - he said it was too violent, he didn't want to have a memory that South Korea was doing bad things to North Korea .

Kampfner

The film is also pointedly controversial because it opts to leave out American soldiers. John Kim Insook's husband says that's OK for his generation. He lived through General Mc Carthur's landing at Inchon . That turned the war around and drove the communist forces back to the 38 th parallel. But Kim says the film doesn't make that clear for young audiences which means he feels a need to fill in the details for his daughter.

John Kim

 Today's younger generation they don't know what that means - America helped Korea .

Kampfner:

South Koreans began to emigrate to America after the war because of the political and economic connections between the countries with many people like John Kim arriving in the seventies. The Korean war shaped the history of the country he left behind country and his life.

John

I am in my fifties - this is my history.

Kampfner

He was moved by the film to reveal emotional wounds which he had kept hidden.

John Kim

After that movie I asked my daughter, how do you feel and she said Daddy I think it is sad. But I told her sad is not enough, there is much more, that movie hurt me, hurt me from deep inside.

Kampfner

Laura knew he had been born in North Korea .  What she now discovered was that he had left behind a huge extended family that he has had no contact with. 

John Kim

We want to see them but we cannot see them. To me it still continues up to today.. it continues - war.

Laura

I have always considered N Koreans as part of my people but this definitely brings it closer to home considering that they are blood.

Kampfner

 Before seeing the movie Laura was apolitical about Korea -now she is upset and alarmed about a divided Korea .

Laura Kim

It gave me a more personal interest and more reason to become more active in the search for reunification and in being more political.

Kampfner:

 Laura went to her first meeting about human rights in North Korea . It was organized by students from Rutgers , not far from her father's bagel store in New Brunswick .

She was excited to discuss the movie with a shy young woman, Nan Hee Pyon who had recently defected from North Korea .   

Nan Hee Pyon

When I saw it - it was a heartbreaking movie. The thought kept coming to me that even the North Koreans who leave - the escapees - they have to live separated from their families

Kampfner:

Max Han who runs a website for fellow New York Koreans said there is more political discussion now on his site.  He said the movie has brought out that he cannot ignore events on the Korean peninsula.

Max Han

 In the movie you get a good grasp of human emotions.. it is an unfortunate part of our history but it is something that has made me more empathetic to the Korean cause and making it more unified and making it the one country it once was.

Kampfner

Many people are writing in reviews of the film says Han and say they cried throughout the movie. Some like 22 year old Michelle Lee are shocked and angry that they were taught nothing about the Korean war at school or at home. She didn't want her parents to shield her.

Michelle Lee

I asked them why we had never discussed what had had happened. I guess that's just part of Korean culture - not really articulating the painful memories of the past.

Kampfner

Tae Guk Gi had the highest grossing opening weekend for a Korean film in America and is running in neighborhood theaters.  But the cultural impact goes beyond the movie house. By shaking up a collective memory it has prompted the sharing of personal stories and a re-evalution of Korean history.    

» Visit the film website

Kampfner There is no white coated scientist on stage. Playwright Caryl Churchill is imagining that human cloning can happen in a recognizable world - this is not science fiction . She has written an intense one hour play which is essentially a family drama. It begins deceptively like a sitcom. The stage is bare except for a brown leather couch and a lamp. Sam Shepard who has not been on the NY stage for thirty years plays a harassed father. Dallas Roberts plays his middle aged son. There’s a bit of an atmosphere. We discover that the dad has just shared some sobering information with his son. Turns out that he took the boy when he was 4 years old to have him cloned.. Right now Dallas as Son no 1 the original is trying to process this news.

Play Son This copy they grew of me .. it worked out all right? Father: there were failures of course, inevitable Son: dead ones. Father: in the test tubes the dishes I was told they didn’t’ all…..

Kampfner The father won’t explain exactly how the cloning was done. From a scraping is all he says. And then somehow …it all starts to work in test tubes…. The scientific techniques are vague. But that is the prerogative of the playwright who is exploring science through art says journalist Faith McLellan who writes for the medical journal The Lancet

Faith McLellan The play is not about how one becomes a clone.. because when we come to see the play the deed is done but I do think what we are doing is in a larger sense ….. looking at the real human anguish.. the play is a warning flagging all kinds of dire consequences involved in this technology.

Kampfner Caryl Churchill writes moral apocryphal plays about the toughest issues in contemporary life but she is poetic rather than polemical . She has been compared to Samuel Beckett. Both are deeply pessimistic but also deeply psychological. This play is called “A Number”. We all feel a number instead of a person at times, you don’t have to be a clone to understand that says Rob Marchesani who’s a psychoanalyst

Rob Marchesani She’s talking about what it must feel like to be a number, this is much more than about cloning, this about human relationships, what it feels like to be a child with a father who does not connect and the effects of trauma. They are doomed.

Kampfner The dynamics of a family conflict are at the forefront of this play says Marchesani. The father grudgingly explains that the boys’ mother committed suicide when he was very small.. After that the father tried to raise the child but the boy had behavior problems .So the father gave him away. But not before he had a baby cloned from the toddler. Now Son no 1 feels abandoned, rejected and in addition there’s a sense of self loathing as he thinks about the crude way his tissue was stolen from him and replicated. He lashes out at his dad…

Dallas Roberts from the play Can we talk about what you did.. you sent me away and had this other one made from some bit of my body - not a limb, they clearly didn’t take a limb like a starfish and. chopped through like a worm and grow the other.. a speck yes because we’re talking that microscope world of giant blobs and globs and they take this painless scrape this specky little cells of me and kept that and you threw the rest of me away.…

Kampfner The story as it unfolds becomes even more shocking . The father claims he has only recently discovered that that in fact multiple copies were made illegally. Way back then that scientist must have gone mad and let the genie out of the bottle. Permission was only given for one copy. Sam Shepard relates all of this so wryly that there is welcome laughter from the audience.

Play Son: You made an effort…Father: I did and for that money you’d think I’d get exclusive Son: they ripped you off father yes one was the deal…son: what did you expect?

Kampfner So at the age of forty the son now learns that there are countless copies of him who are five years younger walking around. Who knows how many exactly? There are a number the father says dismissively..Science writer Faith McLellan says there’s a rational justification for what he did.

Faith McLellan The father represents the scientific view, he wanted a copy, the technology was available, it got out of hand, now he is reactive, he is interested in the consequences, he needs lawyers.

Kampfner. The more clones, the more money there is to be made in a law suit – the father’s imagination runs wild. He is figuring on millions per copy But the father’s character changes over the course of the play. Art Caplan head of bio ethics at the University of Pennyslvania has a brilliant twist on the story..

Art Caplan My take on the father is that he is the scientist. If you watch how the play evolved, you’l see him interviewing his sons , he is curious, he is collecting data from his offspring.

Kampfner And they are different. Dallas Roberts plays each son and it is an acting tour de force. He has a costume change for each one and he gives each subtle nuances of gesture and movement so that we can tell them apart.. Faith Mclellan says the fact that the cloned men are not mere numbers indicates hope for the future. It suggests that environment and upbringing would have an impact even on clones

Faith McLellan Personhood cannot be reduced to the sum of genetics. Son one is anguished, son 2 is not sure of the root of the questions; son 3 is not really concerned about himself as a person. Each son is anguished about who he is and where he came from. Each is untethered.

Kampfner The play is unsettling because it unearths in us a deep rooted terror of anonymity . .Cloning may be in the future but audiences are pushed to think about timeless issues - the struggle for attention in a family of rival siblings, or the fear of identity theft, or of being a cog in a corporate machine. Or even those deeply existential issues which if you are lucky you get to think about in a darkened theater . Like the question of of who am I? And am I in any way original?

For WNYC I’m JK

The New York theater workshop

The medical newspaper The Lancet

National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

Kids are prone to asking questions, like “where did I come from?” These become harder to answer when you’ve cloned your son, but no one’s really sure how many of them were made. In Caryl Churchill’s new play, A Number, there are no white coats or labs, just Sam Shepard playing the father, and a single actor playing three of his genetically identical offspring — each supposedly an improvement over the other. WNYC’s Judith Kampfner went to see the play with a psychologist and a medical ethicist.

The Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi was born a hundred years ago. He died in 1988 and left behind a museum in Long Island City to showcase the breadth and scope of his work. He had an international reputation for large scale landscape design and corporate monuments. But the recently refuburished museum has just opened a special exhibition devoted to another side of his work. WNYC's Judith Kampfner reports.

Kampfner: In 1961, Isamu Noguchi made a pioneering move to Long Island City to convert an industrial building into his studio which he later made into a museum for his work. He wanted control of his destiny - not to be at the mercy of art institutions. Half Japanese, half American, Noguchi traveled the world finding rocks and marble to carve and kept many of his best pieces placing them in a Japanese garden and ten galleries. The Noguchi Museum has started presenting special exhibitions in addition to the permanent collection. Go upstairs from now till next May and you discover another side to the sculptor – his designs for the stage. In an interview before his death in 1988,Noguchi said Japanese theater had influenced him.

Noguchi ( on tape ): My stage sets are minimal; they come from the recollection of Noh play stage in Japan.

Kampfner: There are nine Noguchi stage sets on the upper floor of the museum. He made them for the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Although Noguchi worked with other choreographers, his partnership with Graham was the most consistent – it lasted over four decades from the nineteen thirties to the seventies. He liked the way she used his objects inventively and encouraged him to experiment with different materials. Some sets feature spiky webs of wire and metal, some are structures of primeval wooden bones, others are like pieces of spare modern furniture..Curator Bonnie Rychlak sees the work of the sculptor in each object.

Platform from Embattled Garden, 1958. (Kevin Noble, 2001. Courtesy the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance)

Rychlak: There's a beautiful. I shouldn’t touch.

J: Is this wood? Yes… the way he smoothes this out and you have this edge and there's care, there's a particular way he wants things to move and for the dancers to interact with them.

Kampfner: There is no music or stage lighting. It's as if you are looking at the work before it left for the theater. Visitors can see what's behind and inside the objects. Looking at a very unnaturalistic tree, walking around the back of the trunk, you get to see what was hidden to the audience - you discover crafted steps inside and a lever which pulls down metal branches with plastic leaves. Noguchi called each stage object or prop a living sculpture and each had a title.

Rychlak: "Tree with green leaves"

J: the shape is like 2 surfboards...making an obelisk?

BR: yes ..it’s so simple but the dancers are able to stand on it and they pull this and they have step there.

Kampfner: Nearby in the loft space is an ominous maze of tall sticks which fit into a base which is sculpted and painted –to look like the inside of an apple. Robert Tracy who is the author of separate books about Noguchi and Graham,explains

Tracy: This is the Embattled Garden which is the story of Adam and Eve

J: Here you have steel poles?

RT No.. rattan rods – he said he bought them out in New Jersey. They vibrate as you move in the garden – you push them aside and they come back sort of thing.

Kampfner: The sta ge props were completed by Graham's imagination. A light woven box. from a 1944 dance called Penitente was a pillar which could be collapsed and then opened up so the dancer when she stepped into it became a skeletal figure of death encased in its rib like structure.

Bonnie Lamp: That's a very simple structure in El Penitente, you pick it up and it take its form Gravity and the weight of it holds itself in place and it becomes so many things.

Kampfner: If you say Isamu Noguchi to New Yorkers who are savvy about interior design, they may well say “lanterns ”. Noguchi designed products for everyday living and the Japanese bark paper and bamboo ribbed lamps he called his Akari Light Sculptures can stand over six feet high but collapse into a tiny box .The idea for these lanterns which he devised in the fifties came from that prop from Penitente. Much of Noguchi’s furniture design came from his work for the stage and some of the stage props were lit from inside – a warm sensuous glow to create heighten the drama of Grahams narratives.

Rychak: They both understood the sensousness of the objects and the stories... it’s very clear when you read some of Noguchi's interviews on the walls here how strongly the sexual components is in this objects.

Kampfner: Noguchi and Graham pared primal Greek myths and bible stories down to the essentials..the sets tell the stories but the style was impressionistic and suggestive. Their first collaboration was on a dance called "Frontier", Martha needed a fence. Noguchi gave her a rough wooden saw horse which was like a ballet barre. Dance historian Francis Mason calls this her Americana work.

Mason: She had Noguchi’s fence where she put her leg up and looked at the world from there and raised her hand over her eyes as if she was looking at the great American horizon and this is it for me as if it say. And it’s a wonderful thing to come here to this show and to stand at this fence and feel that.

Kampfner: He dramatized the horizon simply. With a long rope which was pulled taut into a V and gave a perspective of an endless distant landscape. Noguchi explained in an archive tape

Noguchi: I did Frontier in 35, I used a rope that bisected the atmosphere of the theater.

Kampfner: The stark design had a profound effect on Graham says Terese Capucelli,a Martha Graham dancer who now helps run the company.

Capucelli: She said no one understood the sterility of beauty as he did. J : Sterility that’s an odd word TC yes it is I think she was referring to the coolness, the simplicity, down to the bare bone, the clean look, she found that beautiful.

Mason: She knew how to hold the audience in the palm of her hand and Noguchi made that easier for her. Isamu’s settings always set her off and centered her and made her the key creature in the ensemble.

Kampfner: Her elegance Noguchi described as "poetry on the stage." He thought of dance as an extension of sculpture – he thought of the entire stage space as material to craft. Martha Graham took his work and continued to shape it. It was a partnership where each developed each others work and their work evolved together.

For WNYC I’m JK

The special exhibition of stage sets for Martha Graham continues at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City until May 1st next year. It coincides with a Whitney Museum show celebrating the centenary of Noguchi’s birth, which runs till Jan 16th.

Many writers, musicians, and artists got their start in the office — the British novelist Anthony Trollope worked for the postal service and composer Charles Ives was a full-time insurance agent. Judith Kampfner looked into the workaday lives of artists to find out how it fuels their creativity outside the office.

Businessman Donald Rubin started buying Himalayan sacred paintings twenty years ago. Now over 900 works of art from his collection are on display in the new Rubin Museum of Art. The museum opened in Chelsea last October in a building which used to house the original Barneys store. Judith Kampfner spent a day with visitors experiencing an unusual art space.

Kampfner: Over the course of a cold rainy day, many visitors came into the Rubin museum on 17th and 7th avenue. A common initial reaction was to compare the new space with how it looked when it was a store. The reincarnation was a change that tantalized this visitor.

Man: I am amused in walking into this museum which I know was Barneys before it became the Rubin museum that this was in essence the locus of a certain desire in New York for everything material and that here within a museum which is dedicated to the arts of the Himalayas, are lesson after lesson in leaving desire behind and searching for a spiritual truth

Kampfner: That museum goer described himself as a spiritual advisor who had come to look at this art collection from Himalayan monasteries to further his knowledge of Buddhism. This was not his first visit but many were newcomers.

Woman: There's just a wonderful feeling of energy that drew me in from the street. just being in here feels really good. JK Q: A contemporary energy or an ancient energy? A: An ancient energy.

Kampfner: The atrium on the first floor is like a market square with a café and a store where Indian classical music is playing. The interior designers of the museum left one Barney’s fixture – a central curving steel staircase – intact. Walk up to the galleries. On the second level a woman absorbed by portraits of gurus and followers of Buddha, is taking stock of the space.

Woman: I am still taking notes…Beautiful wall colors, the reds and the yellows and the green.

Kampfner: No white walls in this museum - the jewel colors in the paintwork match pigments in the art which came from crushing semi precious stones.

Woman: It looks terrific.... Wonderful little sketch areas. Free magnifying glasses. Area to sit down and meditate. It's unconventional but I'd say at the highest museum standards.

Kampfner: The Rubin collection covers Himalayan art from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries and from a region which stretches from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in the east. There are some Hindu deities on view but the focus is on Tibetan Buddhism. Going from level to level, you move from pictures which document the lives of real sages over the centuries to imaginative illustrations of demons and on up to intricate mystical impressions of heaven One man said it’s like a Buddhist Vatican.

Man: As you move from level to level you kind of get more and more of a sense of that. And when you get to the final one you’re kind of like, "whoa, what is going on here?" It’s not just the art, there’s a lot more, there’s an energy, a spirit here

Kampfner: Himalaya in Sanskrit means "abode of snow". But there is little snow in most of these pictures. They are verdant and bursting with nature and community life – children play and monkeys fight and people picnic around elephants in vignettes around a Buddha. The buddhas come in all shapes and colors –The symbolism of these images can be understood in wall texts which are delightful to read, said this woman.

Woman: I never knew the Buddha’s little bump on his head. I thought it was just a crown thing but I guess it was said that is was a result of his skull, additional wisdom that literally came on the top of his head.

Man: This is the Glorious Goddess Queen of the Power to Turn back Armies.

Kampfner: Most of the paintings in the museum are called thangkas. They are fabric scrolls which the monks rolled up and used as teaching aids for an audience who couldn’t read or write. In these epic narratives gods often look angry but that is only because they fight off evil

Man: The figure is pretty much black but it has highlights of blue in it. Of course the facial expression is very wrathful. Teeth showing, eyes bulging. Even the horse that the figure is riding on has the same expression. It looks like it’s basically riding in a sea of blood. They’re not there to scare you. They’re protectors.

Kampfner: Some visitors find personal meaning in these mythological scenes. One painting depicts a group of wild men aiming bows and arrows at the Buddha. This young woman found it a comforting image.

Woman: I like this because of the absolute serenity of the Buddha in the face of the demons of Mara.

Kampfner: The Buddha sits serene in a golden ring of light. As he does, the tips of the arrows threatening him have miraculously blossomed into flowers.

Woman: Bad experiences can be turned into flowers.relating my own bad experience and realizing that you too can be flower out of them of have flowers out of them

Kampfner: For those visitors who like more abstract paintings, there is a section devoted to mandalas. which are like architectural floor plans depicting residencies of the gods. A visitor who described himself as a Buddhist in training, said working his way around a mandala helped focus his meditation.

Man: You can be flying above it, you can be coming through the side, you can be coming from underground, it’s just that you can see it all, it’s not just a two-dimensional view. Like this right here. You can see the whole palace for what it is. All of the different people who inhabit the palace, all of the different things to teach. All of the different rooms the different places to go. And each different room there’s something new to learn, something new to see. Until you get to the center of the palace, in which the main deity resides.

Kampfner: He picked up a long cushion and put it on the ground and lay on his back listening to his I pod. As he became absorbed in the otherworldly, a woman on the next floor was approaching the art from a political standpoint. She said she was glad that the Rubin collection provides a home for endangered artwork because so many masterpieces were lost after the 1950 Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet.

Woman: There were thousands and thousands of things destroyed and people killed and you know if this maybe opens a doorway to people knowing about that and thinking about it that would be good...

Kampfner: Here is a museum of sacred art which appeals variously to the eye to the mind and the spirit. Travelers come to revisit journeys, connoisseurs of religious art come to make comparisons. And some visit simply to draw sustenance from a peaceful space. I've never seen so many people meditating in a museum. For WNYC, I’m JK.

Links:
» The Rubin Museum of Art

In the late fifties and early sixties, the drug Thalidomide caused birth defects in many parts of the world. Americans at the time were aware of the tragedy but the impact of thalidomide was not an issue which inspired artists. Until now. An off Broadway play called “The Flid Show”, is the personal drama of one victim set against the history of the drug. WNYC’s Judith Kampfner reports

Foyer ambi Kampfner: Many people in the theater audience had never heard of Thalidomide

Woman: It’s thamido..thlido.. …

Kampfner Thalidomide is indeed hard to say. The play’s title the Flid Show comes from a lazy abbreviation. It was the cruel nickname Mat Fraser heard in the schoolyard.

Fraser It was either “Flid” or “Spastic”

Kampfner Fraser is a six foot tall British TV actor and musician .Despite his classic good looks, it’s his short arms and thumbless hands that get stared at. Now aged 42, he has found a way of coming to terms with having foreshortened arms. His argument is – if you want to gawp - come and pay money to do it and he channels his anger as a drummer and rapper.

Fraser rap I’m OK if I can laugh at my own disability.. well hardy ha ha , my arms are so short.. forgive me if I don’t die laughing at this thought.

Kampfner Fraser is now comfortable with addressing his deformity in his art. But when he received a script about thalidomide from an American playwright he was suspicious. Was this shameless appropriation? Would it be caricature and what an audacious title!…Even though thalidomiders have reclaimed the word “flid”, he says, that didn’t give an outsider the right.

Fraser Some guy I’ve never met who doesn’t appear to be disabled is calling a show The Flid Show? Who the hell do you think you are?

Kampfner Fraser’s suspicions were allayed. He liked the angry lead character Duncan the Flid..

Fraser It’s an ideal role….

Kampfner American playwright Richard Willett knew nothing of Mat Fraser’s existence when he wrote The Flid Show. But he felt able to write the piece because he battled with severe scoliosis.

Willett It’s nothing like what thalidomiders go through but it’s an experience with doctors and medicine and especially when I was younger I thought of myself as being deformed.

Kampfner Richard Willett is the same generation as Mat Fraser. From 1959 – 1962 the drug was prescribed for morning sickness and insomnia routinely in Europe Canada Japan and Australia..Willett became obsessed and haunted by images of ten thousand deformed children who were his age.

Willett Growing up I would read articles about it and I would sometimes regret reading them but I would be just drawn to the subject with that irresistible quality of something that’s disturbing but also you can’t get out of your mind.

Kampfner All that reading paid off. He’s written a sweeping drama – how the drug was developed by an ex Nazi scientist , how pharmaceutical bosses allowed it to be sold even after the effects were uncovered, how it was never marketed in the US and how it was finally banned worldwide in 1962.

Willett The history is done as vaudeville - the subject needs comedy

Kampfner Though the stage is populated with real historical figures, the central character is fictional. The play tells the story of Duncan, a nightclub performer whose mother took one thalidomide pill and later committed suicide. Duncan is a bitter and angry. He’s a struggling cabaret singer in a seedy club. One night he’s visited by a kindly ghost who comes out of the wardrobe in his dressing room. She is Frances Kelsey who was responsible for banning Thalidomide in America. For playwright Willett, she was the only hero of the thalidomide tragedy.

Willet She was suspicious of it. She was a new employee of the FDA and it was the first thing she had been given to approve. She and her husband had worked with Quinine in Africa, which had caused birth defects so they were aware of the danger of drugs.

Kampfner Like a Dickensian spirit, Kelsey takes hold of one of Duncan’s flipper arms (that’s what he angrily calls them) and.they revisit the history of the drug. The other kind woman is Duncan’s life is his sister who sets him up with a doctor friend.

(scene) Duncan: Why do you have to bring girls round anyway? Bren: That was not a girl, that was my friend. Dunc: They don’t’ get me, no –one ever gets me. Bren: Oh poor you. Dunc: They don’t. She’s a doctor and even she doesn’t know what to do with me. It’s not like I’m disabled or have a disease. I’m deformed. No-one ever knows how to respond to that. Bren You decide that going in

Kampfner: The doctor, Rachel, becomes Duncan’s girlfriend.

They go dancing. Duncan only likes music written before 1962 - when for him, the world was still innocent. Karen Ott a professional script editor, who helps writers with new plays, went along to the show.

Ott Whey they come together, there’s an awkwardness about how they come to fit together. He has to push and pull a little bit and there’s this jittery moment and she’s not sure what she needs to do but then she wraps her arms around his waist and they have after that a seamless connection like any other couple

Kampfner The glitter ball is subsumed as the house lights go up - intermission.

Woman Just now when they had a dance in the last scene, I had tears in my eyes, I was crying. After a while, I didn’t see it any more, I just saw him as an actor.

Kampfner The dance scene was preparation for a love scene. Long legged Mat Fraser walks onto the stage nude, there’s a bold tattoo on his thigh.

Fraser It’s utterly authentic and real, it’s post coital, it’s the first time you see this character actually his real self without all the brick walls on him – That’s one of the things we are not allowed to be traditionally – is sexual.

Ott The need for the character to reveal all of his nakedness is where the journey is going. I completely bought into his being a fully equipped male.

Kampfner When “The Flid Show” was first produced with Duncan played by an able bodied actor, the sex scene could not be done naked because the actor had his hands tied behind his back. There is no pretense about the deformity with Mat Fraser says Karen Ott.

Ott We are looking at a man who is very close to his character so it breaks down the boundaries between the actor and the role

Kampfner When Mat Fraser is not acting, he is an activist. And he is speaking out now because the drug has resurfaced. It’s being used as a treatment for leprosy, AIDS blindness and cancers.

Fraser In the old days, it was like hey, this is the sleeping pill to end all sleeping pills.. now they are literally going hey.. this could be a cure for some cancers.. how much money is involved in that – somebody somewhere will forget that they shouldn’t be taking it whey they’re pregnant.

Kampfner Unlike Mat, the fictional Duncan decides that the drug can take on a new life. Before only after he has a fight with Rachel when he discovers she is treating a transplant patient with Thalidomid as it’s now called. As the show closes, she takes a pill out of a bottle and places it on her desk. Duncan eyeballs it.. He thinks of his mother swallowing the innocuous little speck – And he forgives her and the drug companies he has demonized for so long.

» New Directions website

A few years on into the revival of Burlesque shows, there's a community of performers who have loyal audiences in clubs and bars. Increasingly dancers and performance artists are reinterpreting the traditions of burlesque cabaret and variety. WNYC's Judith Kampfner checks into the scene and finds that it has even infiltrated the classroom.

KAMPFNER: Fishnet stockings and feather boas aren’t usually the subject of a lecture but today students are taken back to the turn of the twentieth century and topless showgirls.

DR. LYNN SALLY: the naked girls hanging from the chandeliers..

KAMPFNER: The room is packed with would be performers. NYU’s drama department has taken the huge step of offering a History of American Burlesque.

SALLY: The tableau vivants of the Ziegfield Follies, the slightly disrobed women shall we say who became part of the set…are like mannequins – right?

KAMPFNER: This is the story of what was called the illegitimate theater. It began in America in the 1860’s and continued through to the bump and grind striptease acts of the fifties. In the last few years, it’s come back with a new twist – performers of all shapes and sizes play with the stereotypes of striptease to communicate ideas about sexual politics and gender identity..Burlesque now includes styles of performance from belly dancing to Butoh explains Dr Lynn Sally.

SALLY: There’s this neo burlesque going on right now and people don’t really have a historical or conceptual context to place this.

KAMPFNER: These students will develop their own acts and if they are confident enough, perhaps take part in the upcoming New York Burlesque Festival.

MEGAN GEORGE: My name is Megan George. If my father found out I was performing in a burlesque show, he would probably be very frightened. When he found out I was in the class he said what’s the value of that? I don’t think people of my parent’s age see any very real theater in the burlesque movement.

KAMPFNER: Perhaps she should tell her dad that the last Whitney Biennial honored a burlesque performance artist. Or she could say that many burlesque performers are college graduates. Take Lynn Sally her professor who performs as “Lucky” in a self contained act which she presents at the elegant Galapagos, a converted factory in Brooklyn..Robert Elmes who’s the director here has been presenting variety for four years

ROBERT ELMES: The creativity doesn’t have limits. It’s a beginning art form, it’s reinvigorated, it’s something that’s come back.

KAMPFNER: Striptease used to be dumbed down, like a bad movie says Elmes – now the work is often both intelligent and from people who are highly trained in dance and physical theater. . He describes a favorite performer.

ELMES: Selena Vixen she performs Man Ray’s cello.. to wonderful music.. she occasionally shows an arm. Any time you have sensuality on stage.. you are giving a gift to the audience.

KAMPFNER: The audiences at Burlesque showcases don’t venerate the performers and the mc sets the mood.

ELMES: Some audiences need a spanking and some a caress.

KAMPFNER: On Friday nights at The Slipper Room on Orchard Street, Miss Saturn is the MC. Before the show she goes over to the dj with her blue leather cat suit provocatively unzipped. Once on the creaky tiny stage, she tries in vain to make the curtains meet. We get a sneak peep..

(Miss Saturn from the stage)

KAMPFNER: Miss Saturn holds out her martini glass and people oblige her by pouring in beer.. Men and women, when the spirit moves them, dance up to the stage and tuck money into the performers costumes.. One woman’s persona is of a desperate housewife ironing each piece of clothing as she disrobes. Another opens her routine with some stand up.

New burlesque acts range from the raw to the highly rehearsed . A troupe called The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus looks at types of sexual behaviour using routines from novelty acts. They mock the seriousness of the S and M scene in a skit where blindfolded performer Stephanie Monseu is tied up by skinny balloons.. Her partner pops each balloon with a cigarette.. slowly…

MONSEU: I’m unable to figure out which direction this taunting is coming from . I’m finally released from rm bondage and get my revenge by giving him a good stiff kick but I’m titillated and we end up exchanging rubber through the mouth and nose.

KAMPFNER: Nothing is taboo. The British band Tiger Lilies, who are currently on stage in New York, sing about venereal disease, bestiality, child sex and gas chambers. And they even have a crucifixion song which singer Martyn Jacques delivers in his androgynous voice. The look of their act is inspired by the classic era of cabaret – the thick white pancake and bowler hats of Weimar Germany...Jacques and Adrian Stout – who plays bass explain.

JACQUES/STOUT: From Berlin, where cabaret comes from. …There’s a dark seedy quality , it’s risqué - something of the underworld, an undercurrent.

KAMPFNER: Now the Tiger Lilies perform on stage with actors and puppets. Their show called “Shock Headed Peter” is based on macabre nineteenth century German poems for children.. Each naughty child dies a terrible death. A high profile cabaret inspired show like this is a big departure for the new burlesque environment says Robert Elmes of Galapagos. It’s proof that it has bubbled uptown and is having an impact on mainstream audiences.

ELMES: If burlesque evolves into a full theatrical evening, with theatrical through lines, then you have the possible evolution back to cabaret and that’s the curious thing, it can influence Broadway and it can improvise traveling shows.. to Peoria and Columbus Ohio.

KAMPFNER: What’s delightful about this kind of theater is its mischieviouness. When the Tiger lilies came to the studio, we only had a piano.. so I rustled up some spoons for the percussion. And they recreated a charmingly innocent ditty.

(Suicide Song )

A new play at Columbia University is the latest work from British theater director Peter Brook. The work explores the life and teaching of a West African Sufi master. WNYC’s Judith Kampfner has more on the play, which is in French with English supertitles.

SOUND OF PLAY: Ta verite, ma verite, la verite

Your truth, my truth, the truth –the philosophy of this play is that the truth belongs to no –one.

The West African Sufi mystic Tierno Bokar believed that religious faith is a personal journey and no one path is right. He was born in 1875 and died in 1939 and spent most of his life in a small village in Mali. Bokar converted many people to an open and tolerant form of Islam.

Seekers came from far and wide to ask Tierno Bokar questions and he would reply by telling parables, drawing on the Koran and traditional West African storytelling.

Actor Sotigui Koyate is a long time member of Peter Brook’s troupe and is originally from Mali.Tall and thin, he has a long face and doleful eyes. He moves slowly with grace and dignity and when he sits serenely on a straw mat on the bare stage–he’s bathed in golden light. The director Peter Brook hopes that the audience will be touched by the moments of stillness.

BROOK: Now Tierno Bokar, you experience a quality through him and it’s experienced by everyone together through silence. When you see a work of art like an icon or a Buddha, or a cathedral, something in you receives you experience a quality of silence, there is a moment when you are touched by that quality.

Bokar scholar Professor Louis Brenner says Brook has captured the contemplative essence of the sufi master.

BRENNER: The theater of Peter Brook is not so much an entertainment as an invitation to some kind of inner reflection.

Brook If coming to the theater one person goes away with their own wish to look beyond all the difficulties and understandable pressures and impossible stresses of material life. We’re more than rewarded. Our job is not to convert anybody but to give a little nourishment

And that nourishment may be the reward for working hard to stay with the story. The set is austere and the super titles hang high above the stage. Not to mention, that Bokar’s teachings are often enigmatic – it’s an hour and a half of sheer concentration.

BROOK: We only want people to come who get an impression that this is something that could interest them. We are not fighting to entertain them.

The audience has to grapple not only with religious concepts, but a history lesson on French colonial Africa.

As the play unfolds the French colonial authorities take action against Tierno Bokar and his followers. His young disciple describes the atrocities and it’s impossible not to make comparisons with Iraq

BROOK: One of the moments that in performances here have been so powerful, is when you hear the young African saying that he goes from post to post and at each one of them is a new general in charge and then they’re described - that there’s been torture and humiliation, pissing on one person handling them brutally, threatening them.

Despite the oppression, Bokar refuses to blame his enemies, in fact he embraces them. Professor Ousmane Kane from Columbiasays that shatters many prejudices against the Islamic faith:

KANE: What they can learn seeing this play is terror inspired by variants of Islamic fundamentalism is just one side of the Islamic story. Another side would be tolerant, open minded and even a mystical Islam who advocates believe there are so many paths to salvation.

By the end of the play, Bokar is under house arrest. He cannot go to the mosque, and lives out his last years impoverished and deserted by his followers who are frightened to be associated with him. Professor Brenner.

BRENNER: At the moment a Muslim dies, he should recite there is no god but god.. but if you can’t recite then you can take your index finger and place it over your hears. Very slowly Tierno makes this gesture and you have this hint that the breath has gone out of him as he lightly gives way and dies in a very moving moment for me.. the image was very strong.

BROOK: For ten minutes there usually a marvelous silence at the end of the performance and people live with something of their own.

KAMPFNER: I felt a bit ridiculous but I ventured to tell Brook my own thought in that quiet time –a fervent wish to find a wise teacher and sit on a mat with him under a tree.

BROOK: I think that is marvelous. And for you then is to see that’s an image. But that’s not truly the essence of what you mean. You’re turning it into a pretty picture. Now either you are satisfied with a pretty picture in which you’ll find a wise man and sit on a mat or you do something much more demanding on yourself which is to come back to what in me is really yearning.

There was a party last night at the British consulate on Third Avenue, just hours after the explosions yesterday morning. WNYC's Judith Kampfner reports that attendees were relaxed as they celebrated Tony Blair's winning of a historic third term as prime minister.

Although police guided guests to a side entrance, security wasn't tight - there were no bag or id checks - just names crossed of a list. British and American guests were in relaxd party moord. Not many too much notice of the tv screens documenting the election results. That echoed the apathetic response in Britain to the election campaign. And there was little concern or conjecture about the bombs. The majority of people at the party wondered if this was the work of a disgruntled individual objecting to Tony Blair's allegiance to America in Iraq.

The British Consul-General , Sir Philip Thomas, said he momentarily had considered calling off the party, but he and Mayor Bloomburg had decided on a policy of business as usual. Nasty stuff happens, he said with a shrug. For WNYC, I'm, Judith Kampfner.