Freespace

Shakespeare in California, Summer/Autumn 2014

A Noise Within (Glendale)
            Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Sept. 7-Nov. 24

Intrepid Shakespeare Company (San Diego)
            Much Ado About Nothing: July 24-Aug. 16
            Titus Andronicus (staged reading): Oct. 27

Shakespeare Orange County
            Midsummer Night's Dream: June 21-July 19
            Romeo & Juliet: Aug. 30-Sep. 20

California Shakespeare Theater (Berkeley)
            Midsummer Night's Dream: Sep. 3-28
            Comedy of Errors: June 25-July 20

Woodward Shakespeare Festival
            Macbeth: June 19-July 12
            Taming of The Shrew: July 24-Aug. 16
            The Tempest: Aug. 28-Sept. 20

Independent Shakespeare, L.A.
            Twelfth Night: July 24-Aug. 31
            Taming of The Shrew: June 26-Aug. 29

Shakespeare's Associates (Livermore)
            Much Ado About Nothing: June 19-July 6

Coronado Playhouse
            Romeo & Juluet: June 27-July 20

L.A. Shakespeare Center 
            Romeo & Juliet: July 8-26

Festival Theatre Ensemble ( Los Gatos)
            Julius Caesar: May 31-June 27 & July 19-Aug. 8
            Much Ado About Nothing: June 6-28 & July 18-Aug. 9

Merced Shakespeare Festival
            Cymbeline: Sept. ?

Murphy's Creek Theater
            Twelfth Night: June 13 - July 19

Sacramento Shakespeare Festival
            Much Ado About Nothing: July 5-Aug. 3
            As You Like It: July 27

San Francisco Shakespeare Festival
            Taming of The Shrew: June 28-Sep. 21
            As You Like It: Oct. 21-Nov. 8

Old Globe San Diego
            Othello: June 22 - July 27
            Two Gentlemen of Verona: Aug. 10-Sep. 14

Shakespeare By The Sea
            Midsummer Night's Dream: June 12-Aug.16
            Hamlet: June 19-Aug. 15

Marin Shakespeare Company
            As You Like It: July 12-Aug. 10
            Romeo & Juliet: July 26-Sep. 28

Shady Shakespeare (Santa Clara)
            Taming of The Shrew: June 13-June 29
            Othello: July 25-Aug. 29

Santa Clarita Shakespeare Festival
            Cymbeline: TBA

Vallejo Shakespeare in The Park
            Midsummer Night's Dream: July 16-Aug. 10

Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum (L.A.)
            King Lear: June 7-Sep. 28
            Much Ado About Nothing: July 12-Sept. 28
            All's Well That Ends Well: June 21-Sep. 27
            Midsummer Night's Dream: June 8-Sept. 27

Kingsmen Shakespeare Company (Thousand Oaks)
            Twelfth Night: June 27-29, July 3, 5-6, July 11-13
            Antony & Cleopatra: July 18-20 & 25-27, Aug. 1-3

Long Beach Shakespeare Festival
            King Lear: May 30-June 21
            Richard III: Aug. 22-Sep. 13
            Henry VI, Pt. 1 (public read-along): July 13
            Henry VI, Pt. 2 (public read-along): July 20
            Henry VI, Pt. 3 (public read-along): July 27

CityShakes (L.A.)
            Romeo & Juliet: July 11-July 27

Zombie Joes Underground Theater (L.A.)
            Midsummer Night's Dream: June 27-Aug. 15

Shakespeare In The Vines (Temecula)
            Merry Wives of Windsor: June 12-28
            Henry V: July 10-26
            The Tempest: Aug. 7-23

Southern California Shakespeare Festival
            Julius Caesar: Sept. 13-Oct. 5

Merced Shakespearefest 
           Merchant of Venice, Feb. 24-Mar. 4
           A Midsummer Night's Dream, Aug.?

Davis Shakespeare Ensemble
            Much Ado About Nothing: June 26-Aug. 2

Sacred Fools Theater Co. (Los Angeles)
            Hamlet Max June 15-24

Sebastopol Shakespeare Company Napa Valley
            TBA

Central Coast Shakespeare Festival (Paso Robles)
            Taming of The Shrew: July 10-26
            Midsummer Night's Dream: July 17-Aug. 2

Winters Theatre Company
            All's Well That Ends Well: TBA

Quest Theaterworks (Nevada County)
            Twelfth Night: July 5

Berkeley City Club
            Hamlet (One Man Show): June 26

Sunnyvale Community Center
            The Tempest: June 19, 20, 21, 26, July 6, 17, 19

Mysterium Theater (Santa Ana)
            Midsummer Night's Dream: May 31-June 22
            Twelfth Night: July 12-27
            The Tempest: August 2-17
            Henry IV pt. 1: June 21-July 6

We Players (San Francisco)
            Macbeth: June 5-29 (staged at Fort Point)

Rhonda Vincent Lonesome Wind Blues (unplugged)

Very cool: when the generator broke at a bluegrass festival in Texas in 2010, Rhonda Vincent and her band went down into the audience and played anyway. And they are so great.

Maya Angelou and the poetry of economic liberty

I wrote about Angelou's poem "Times Square Shoeshine Composition" and capitalism a few years ago at The Volokh Conspiracy.

A new review of The Conscience of The Constitution

From David Shestokas.

Right to Try: it’s time to stop experimenting on people against their will

Colorado has now passed, and other states are likely to pass, Right to Try legislation which declares as a matter of state law that terminally ill patients have a right to use medication that has been approved for safety, but not necessarily for efficacy, by the FDA. The current FDA drug approval process is long and cumbersome, and untold thousands of people die, and far more suffer, every year, while drugs and treatments that could help them are being tested to FDA specifications. Right to Try would let people who are going to die anyway try drugs that might improve their conditions—or might not. But it makes clear that it’s their body, and should be their choice.

Who could oppose such a compassionate and common-sense reform? The pharmaceutical bureaucracy and its supporters. And while their arguments are couched in the dispassionate tones of scientific objectivity and rationality, those arguments boil down to a cruel, indeed, unethical exploitation of sick people who lack the political strength to protect themselves.

Take this clip from a CNN debate. In it, former FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach says that the reason for legally forbidding terminally ill patients from obtaining safe experimental medicines is “to make sure that they are getting the right thing in the right way.”

But what does that mean? Who has the right to ensure that I “get the right thing in the right way”? Shouldn’t I have that right? There’s no doubt that, for instance, my diet could be improved—I eat a lot of fast food. Should the FDA have the power to dictate to me what meals I can eat, in order to ensure that I “get the right thing in the right way”? I watch some pretty lousy quality television sometimes. Should the government control what choices I make in order to ensure that I “get the right thing in the right way”? Or, even worse, should the government dictate what I eat or watch, not for my own benefit, but in order to ensure that other people eat and watch “the right thing in the right way”? Said plainly, what Dr. von Eschenbach means is that the government should dictate what people ingest in order to ensure that they ingest what the government approves of: you have no right over your own body, no right to make your own medical choices—you should just do what bureaucrats tell you, because they know, as you do not, what is “the right thing,” and “the right way.”

This is not a scientific question at all. This is a question of morality and political philosophy. Whose body is it to make mistakes with? Is it mine, or is it Dr. von Eschenbach’s?

Even more explicit is David Gorski’s post on the Science Based Medicine Blog. Putting aside his incendiary and inaccurate political smears, Dr. Gorski’s argument against Right to Try is: “Just because a drug has passed phase I trials does not mean that it is effective. It does, however, frequently mean that the drugs have significant side effects. Indeed, determining those adverse events is part of the entire reason that we do clinical trials in the first place.” To allow terminally ill patients to access experimental therapies is bad because it would throw off the testing that might prevent “the premature diffusion” of those therapies.

In other words, the snail-pace of current testing regimens should remain in place because we need a control group for clinical trials. That control group consists of the people who are prohibited from accessing the experimental therapies while the tests drag on.

Now, I won’t stoop to Dr. Gorski’s ad hominem—I’ll grant that he has the best motives in mind: trying to prevent bad therapies from entering the market. We should all be able to agree on that; none of us is pro-quackery. The problem is that the testing regimen he has in mind implicitly includes denying human beings access to drugs they would choose to take if they could, in order that those people can be used as a baseline against which to test experimental results. What is that? That is a form of human medical experimentation without those people’s consent. It is every bit as much an experiment on a human subject as the Tuskegee experiments were—just couched in the polite guise of bureaucratic paperwork.

Interestingly, Dr. Gorski has written quite powerfully about the history and ethics of human medical experimentation: “Key to finding the balance,” he says, “is to respect patient autonomy and to provide true informed consent that accurately balances risks versus benefits and to protect patients from any form of coercion.” But where’s the respect for autonomy and consent with a testing regimen that denies people access to medications they would prefer to take because The State has determined that the only legally acceptable method for drug approval is one in which they are—so sorry!—simply given no say?

There’s no denying that broader access to experimental medicine will have risks and may make testing more complicated in some ways. But is that grounds for ignoring the role of consent and ridiculing the concept of patient autonomy, as Dr. Gorski does, as “an ideological purpose rooted in libertarian politics”? Is that justification for ignoring the ethical principle of justice—and maintaining a system whereby exceptions are allowed on an ad hoc, arbitrary, politically-motivated basis, rather than on a single, principled foundation? Is that a justification for the government telling people what drugs—safe drugs, mind you!—they may take and may not—and not for the benefit of the patient himself, but for the benefit of others, in violation of the principle of beneficence? Dr. Gorski minimizes all of this as “false hope.” But whose hope is it, anyway?

It’s sad that otherwise rational people are crossing the line of paternalism and ignoring the hard-won ethical principle of autonomy.  Right to Try is not fundamentally about scientific testing regimens. It’s about patient freedom of choice. It’s a question of whether you own your body, or whether others have the right to dictate to you what is the “right way” for you to take medicine that might help you.

Disclosure: My wife, Christina Sandefur, is an attorney with the Goldwater Institute. I have often worked with the Institute (though not as an employee) since I agree with the work that they do.

The real Benghazi scandal

It’s understandable why people on both sides are so worked up over the investigations and queries about the attack on the Benghazi embassy, and where the president was, and so forth and so on. But what ought to shock us all is how little attention is being paid even yet to the fact that the Administration not only obviously* manufactured the story that the attack was somehow sparked by a YouTube video, but responded to this supposed cause by tracking down an American-based filmmaker and finding a pretext for throwing him in jail to appease those who were supposedly outraged. Whatever one thinks about the attack on the embassy itself, or the State Department’s or military’s response to it, the true scandal here is that the American government, in blatant violation of the First Amendment and a tradition of free speech that stretches back almost half a millennium, found a political pretext whereby to punish a man who produced a public statement that (allegedly) upset people.

And if the Administration actually did believe the attack had been sparked by that video, that only makes its behavior all the more deplorable.

We in the west are now growing so accustomed to self-censorship and cowardice that, as Mark Steyn notes, we can hardly imagine expressing the bold defiance we expressed only twenty years ago. And it’s not just here. In Britain a few weeks ago, a political candidate was arrested for uttering an offensive speech—i.e., quoting Winston Churchill. But Britain’s protections for free speech have always been less absolute than those provided under our Constitution. The Obama Administration—charged with upholding that Constitution and defending the right of all Americans to utter, publish, and broadcast their opinions no matter how unpopular or offensive—sought instead to defuse a conflict with the Islamic world, not by standing up for free speech, but by tracking down a movie maker and searching for a barely plausible excuse to imprison him. Is there any doubt what this Administration would have done to Rushdie had it been him?

There was a day when liberals would have been the most infuriated by such conduct. They once fought brave battles for the right to express even the most outrageous opinions, no matter what snarling theocrats and reactionary brutes might threaten. But today, they’ve circled the wagons around the Administration to such a degree that they cannot even bring themselves to pretend that they cherish the values of free speech for which they once sacrificed so much.

*-At a reader's suggestion, I've removed my claim that the Innocence of Muslims excuse was obviously counterfeited by the Administration, though I still think it most likely.

My interview in The Objective Standard

The summer issue of The Objective Standard includes an in-depth interview with me, discussing my new book, some of PLF's recent cases, including the Obamacare case and our recent victory for economic liberty in Kentucky, and my advice for would-be freedom activists. Subscribers can read it online today, and the hardcopies will be mailed and will appear on newsstands in the coming days.

Ten years of (this incarnation of) Freespace

It's actually about 11 years for the blog, but I moved to Typepad on this day ten years ago.

Hillsdale’s Great Books 101

Hillsdale is offering a free, online course on “The Great Books.” A relatively short catalogue of works—The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, The Inferno, Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and some Bible passages—but it includes lectures by Professor David Whalen, who was my professor for the full Great Books course when I was a student there. Dr. Whalen is simply the best professor I ever had for any subject, bar none,* and the chance to hear him teach is not to be missed. I strongly recommend signing up for that reason, alone.

*-Which is not to say I agree with him on everything; quite the contrary.

Arendt's response to Anouilh and Huxley

In his Antigone, Jean Anouilh portays civil disobedience as essentially hopeless in a totalitarian world which can erase memory and thus render the act of resistance pointless. In a similar vein, Huxley's Brave New World presents a totalitarianism which absorbs and neuters, rather than crushes, its opposition. These and other works reflect a sense that in the modern world, the tyrant's power is so awesome that it can be hopeless to resist. To that, Hannah Arendt replies in Eichmann in Jerusalem,

It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres--through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flamethrowers and bone-crushing machinery--were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents "disappear in silent anonymity" were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be "practically useless," at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can be reasonably asked, for this planet to remain a fit place for human habitation.

I would like to believe her. Not sure I do.