From the archives…

PIFA 2013: HSP’s ArkHIVE and other theatrical highlights

“[H]alf-way up the hill, I see the Past Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,— A city in the twilight dim and vast, With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Mezzo Cammin” As a history buff, I was put off by the inaugural Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, which celebrated Paris in the second decade of the twentieth century… with scant mention of the epochal event of that decade: a war which killed perhaps 5% of the Parisian population, came within 100 miles of the city, led to mass evacuation and unrest, and was closely followed by the most deadly flu epidemic of the century.