Clocking in at 70 minutes, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, directed by Ciaran O'Reilly at Irish Rep (through Dec. 6), is tragedy in fast-motion. The first half of the play is an exposition as to the ruler's rise to power—he was a slave in America, who, through trickery and intimidation, came to be the ruler of a native land—and the second half is his torture by ghosts in the jungle, as he escapes his voodoo-practicing subjects' sudden uprising. In this case, consisting of lots of neat-o puppets.

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If you attend Ghost Light, currently onstage through Oct. 31 at 59E59, you should be looking for “a little bit of strange,” like the play's two main characters who go to a seedy motel room—complete with flickering light and ceiling mirror. In their case, it's an unlikely affair in which they dip outside their usual social circles in order to get something they want. But in your case, it being so close to Halloween, you probably want the kind of strange that just comes out and says Boo! already. Luckily, neither you nor they get the expected, making way for a tantalizing, utterly absorbing hour. But the allure of the crowd-pleasing, cheap scare is a strong one, my friends, and it’s no surprise that it even seduces José Zayas, this show's otherwise-precise director, in the end.

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More tranquilizing than a washing machine and folksier than Sarah Palin, "A Prairie Home Companion" host Garrison Keillor is not anyone's definition of a schmancy guy. Wearing a red tie down to his crotch, red socks and red sneakers, he looks like a professor who futzes about those rear first-floor stacks at The Strand—think Dwight Shrute aged 40 years. But like any good performer, on Sunday night Keillor habituated himself quite comfortably with the Park Avenue crowd for his cabaret show, "Man In Tux In Red Shoes With Piano," in the Regency Hotel ballroom. These lily-white and wrinkled folks, nibbling at $26 plates of cheese and crackers and toasting their cocktails to each other, could have easily been a Darien High School 59th high school reunion. In other words, the farthest demographic ever from those in fictional Lake Wobegon.

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I joined a small crowd in the seedy basement of a Lower East Side bar last night where the focus was not drinking but debating. The question: "Should we eat locally?"

For the past four years, Todd Seavey has hosted the monthly "Debates at Lolita Bar" on 266 Broome St. Past debates have addressed topics ranging from, "Did the government know in advance about 9/11?" and "Should we loosen term limits?" to "Does Christian rock suck?" and "Is it more painful to get dumped or do the dumping?"

In the dimly lit basement where onlookers leaned against wood-paneled walls and sipped drinks from the bar, Saifedean Ammous and Jesse Anttila-Hughes, both PhD students in Sustainable Development at Columbia, argued their sides in a traditional debate format.

"There's an inherent value in not eating something that's traveled halfway across the globe," said Anttila-Hughes, who told a horror story about soy sauce in China that had been made from human hair in his opening remarks to enforce his points about why knowing exactly where your food comes from makes so much sense.

"It's only because of advanced ways of producing and shipping food that we can think of food in these 'cute' ways," retorted Ammous later, whose main point was that local food is not bad, just not necessarily better than food from around the globe. "If people in New York City think they're 'doing good' by eating locally, they're either wrong or deluded."

Michel Evanchik, who moderated the debate, asked the room to vote for either side after the closing remarks. By a 14-9 show of hands, not eating locally won.  

"This is the first time I've heard this argued not between a stupid hippie and a stupid redneck," Evanchik said after thanking the participants.



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