May 1^st, 2003

    Our second annual May Day presentation landed with poetic irony on the very day that George W. Bush grandiloquently announced the supposed triumph of his illegal invasion of Iraq.  For this auspicious occasion we just had to hold a staged reading of Irwin Shaw's haunting anti-war epic BURY THE DEAD.
    Written in 1936, the only other time this play was performed 'round these parts was in 1940 by the now non-existent Buffalo Contemporary Theatre.  An all-but-forgotten gem of American protest theatre, BURY THE DEAD is set "two years into the war that begins tomorrow night" and depicts mortally wounded soldiers rising from mass graves demanding someone account for their deaths.
    Our stage reading of BURY THE DEAD was held in the backroom of Allentown's Rust Belt Books.