Jacqueline's Reviews > Time Stands Still

Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies
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bookshelves: plays, uk-us-au, artsy

"I live off the suffering of strangers. I built a career, a reputation, on the sorrows of people I don't know and will never see again."

The morality of photojournalism- "the kind of cannibalism that is part of being an artist drawing from the world. You're taking things, you're using them. I'm not making a judgment about artists being bad people. I just think it's the nature of being an artist, it's a response to the world."

!!! [the moral implications of witnessing atrocity from a distance => but: “Every edit is a lie.”― Jean-Luc Godard => therefore non- intervention: justifiable? ]

He asks aloud, "What's morally justifiable?" then answers. "It's all relative. That's part of the argument of the play."

"My plays often deal with the problem of being an artist," he says, meaning the crises of conscience that afflict creative people reckoning with the moral compromises their work sometimes entails.

Sarah's conscience: In the case of Sarah in "Time Stands Still," it's the growing fear that she has traded successfully on the impoverished victims of war and deprivation -- the subjects who end up in the pages of magazines and in handsome books resting on the coffee tables of Manhattan's affluent elite.

"It's what photography does, it captures and freezes time," Margulies says about the title. "I thought it a euphonious title. It seemed appropriate.

// solid but not wow- inducing
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Reading Progress

May 19, 2016 – Shelved
May 19, 2016 – Shelved as: to-read
May 19, 2016 – Shelved as: plays
May 19, 2016 – Shelved as: uk-us-au
Started Reading
May 20, 2016 – Shelved as: artsy
May 20, 2016 – Finished Reading

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