A Beautiful Inspector Discovers More Style Than Substance

The responsibility that we all have as human beings toward our fellow human beings is illuminated and exaggerated into the dark parable An Inspector Calls playing now at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

Written by J.B. Priestley in 1945, and set in a fictional British town in 1912, the story takes place in real time as the wealthy Birling family is visited by a mysterious inspector who informs them that a young woman has committed suicide and they all may have had a role to play in it.

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There’s Not Much Substance There For Hir.

By Patrick Hurley

There is a continuing theatrical narrative of patriarchal and hegemonic representation. A plethora of American stories that deal with the lower to middle class American family through a very traditional lens, highlighting struggle. For the last decade or so, the surge of identity politics, awareness of a need to be more inclusive and  over-correction of the aforementioned narrative, there has been a shift in the collective narrative from the white heteronormative expectancy of canonical works into one of many colors, shapes, sexual orientations, gender identities and cultural re-appropriations.