Douglas Whaley

I have just recently learned that I will be directing the suspenseful play “Bad Seed” at Little Theatre Off Broadway in Grove City.   It will be my ninth show with them.   Auditions are this coming Sunday and Monday at the theater.   The leads are the mother and the very young girl (eight to ten, or able to play that age).   The plot is described below, but the basic premise is that the little girl may actually have murdered a classmate and the mother has no idea what to do about that.   Casting the little girl will be the challenge.   She has to be able to act, of course, but more than that she has to be able to handle the emotional baggage of playing a child who has no moral compass and would as easily kill someone as argue with them.   The play has been a favorite of mine since I read it when I was in my early teens (it was a hit on Broadway in the mid-1950s and then a popular movie).   If we do the show justice audiences ...

This recent decision, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission , which I’ve written about before when it first reached the United States Supreme Court (see Related Posts below) pits a Colorado gay couple seeking a wedding cake against a religious baker who refused to make it for them because he believes the bible only allows men and women to marry.   The couple pursued him through the Colorado legal system and ended up with a Colorado Court of Appeals decision in their favor, holding that the baker violated a state statute forbidding discrimination on the basis (among other things) of sexual orientation.   An appeal was taken to the United States Supreme Court, where the Justices would have to draw some sort of line between the First Amendment right to religion freedom and the right of the states to forbid discrimination on various grounds (race, religion, sex, etc.). [Ginsberg, Kagan, Kennedy,Alito, Roberts, Sotomayer, Thomas, Gorsuch, Bre...