Romeo, Romeo—Where the hell are you, Romeo? The Albuquerque Little Theatre is looking for 12 men and eight women, teenaged and up, to take part in a new production of Shakespeare's romantic suicidal classic. The play, directed by Peter Kierst, opens in January. Auditions will take place at the theater (224 San Pasquale SW) this Saturday, Nov. 18, from 1 to 4 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 19, from 7 to 10 p.m. with possible callbacks on Monday, Nov. 20. Expect to deliver cold readings from the script. All parts, apparently even the biggies, are still open, so aim big! 242-4750.

On opening night, right before the show, director David Richard Jones described the historic premiere of Beckett's first and most famous play, Waiting for Godot. Originally written and performed in French, Beckett hoped to find a smallish theater in Paris to stage it. He didn't have much luck. According to Jones, Beckett finally found a tiny venue on the brink of collapse. The owners had wearied of the financial and psychological stress of running a theater, so they decided to hammer in the last stake, figuring Waiting for Godot would be the ideal play to drive their little venture out of business.

Everything is relative.

Here in the U.S., we women bitch about men, traffic, our paychecks, the coffee and/or the weather. But in Haiti, women aren’t bitching. They’re too busy struggling to stay alive.

Among this year’s PEN Southwest Book Award winners is Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance, Albuquerque activist Beverly Bell’s account of the lives of women in Haiti. Bell received the inaugural PEN NM Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of Social Justice last week.

I caught up with her to talk about her book, but we moved far beyond Walking on Fire and PEN, largely because both naturally lend themselves to a discussion of the larger world.