June 25, 2024 - Boston theatre, Black history in the Gilded Age, and Sebastian Junger

Today on The Culture Show, contributor Joyce Kulhawik goes over the latest plays and movies to take in. She’s an Emmy-award winning arts and entertainment reporter and  president of the Boston Theatre Critics Association. From there we enter the Gilded Age. When families such as the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts expanded their wealth, they needed to spend it. In the summers, they decided to do that in Newport, Rhode Island, creating one of America’s first resort towns by  building mansions on the rugged coastline. This is the Gilded Age most people know. But it’s far from the full story. This was also a time of Black prosperity and Newport was a place where African heritage families were an active part of the community.An exhibition at Rosecliff Mansions places Black history in the context of The Gilded Age. It’s on view through the end of the month. Culture show co-host James Bennett II gives us an overview. Finally, Sebastian Junger. He  is an author and award-winning journalist whose reporting takes him–and his audiences- into treacherous places. He plunged us into the horrors of commercial fishing by way of his bestselling book, “The Perfect Storm.”  Through his reporting and filmmaking he showed us what war looked like, embedding  with a US platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley.  But it is from his home on Cape Cod where he brings us into his most palpable encounter with death–that would be his own death.It’s the subject of his latest book “In My TIme of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.”