Theater review: Cleveland Public Theatre's excellent ‘Ancestra' examines fight for women's equality

[theHandpuppet]

http://www.news-herald.com/arts-and-entertainment/20140527/theater-review-cleveland-public-theatres-excellent-ancestra-examines-fight-for-womens-equality
The Cleveland (OH) News Herald
Theater review: Cleveland Public Theatre's excellent ‘Ancestra' examines fight for women's equality
By Roy Berko, [e-mail]
Posted: 05/27/14

Watching Cleveland Public Theatre’s “Ancestra” is both an enlightening and a depressing experience. Depressing in that the play adds yet another layer to the ongoing tale of the fight for women’s equality in what was and in many ways still is a conservative-white man’s world. In spite of progress, such issues as equal pay for equal work, women’s health care and reproductive rights are still lagging.

Enlightening, especially to those who know little about the rights movements in this country, the rights of women, blacks and homosexuals/transgendered persons. Unfortunately, those who really needed to get the edification probably won’t attend the play. It would be too threatening to their closed minds and unbending beliefs.

The National Women’s Rights Convention was a series of annual meetings that brought visibility to the women’s rights movement in the United States. The first convention was held in 1850, in Worcester, Mass. That session attracted men and women who were advocates for temperance, abolition and suffrage for women...

... The authors have creatively woven flashes from the past with instances of the present to create an effective portrayal of their message “to celebrate those who came before and champions of current efforts to achieve dignity and justice.”

MORE at link posted above.