Radiant

In Dale Dunn's new play, Body Burden, a middle-aged woman recovering from thyroid cancer returns to her hometown of Los Alamos to confront her past. Set against the backdrop of the development of the atomic bomb, the play features six characters, including the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer and a time-traveling girl scout.

1x20 at the Downtown Contemporary Art Center

The theme of the show, 20 photographers using the same model, is not so much a curatorial endeavor as it is an assignment. Like Fish Story, on view last month at Exhibit 208, the works have a superficial connection through their subject matter, though I got the sense that the fish show was comprised of artists who had already been considering fish as their subjects before being asked to exhibit their work. In the case of 1x20, the work was clearly crafted for the show—a gimmick that provides little context in which the works can cohere.

For someone who has been referred to as a chick-lit writer, Laura Moriarty, who will be in Albuquerque this week, is both thoughtful and candid about the state of fiction in the U.S. and where her work fits in. “I worry that the subtle but persistent marginalization of women writers ... is a slippery slope—for certain people, ‘chick-lit’ refers to any book that has a predominantly female cast,” Moriarty notes. But “you don’t see The Kite Runner categorized as Men’s Fiction, though all the major characters are male. I don’t even think most book stores have a section for Men’s Fiction, unless it refers to gay literature. As I understand it, Men’s Fiction is just called Fiction.