Ms. Allen, whose previous stage appearance in New York was in "Speaking in Tongues," in 2001, took time out between rehearsals last week to talk about the play and about her other lives as a teacher, stage director and proprietor of Karen Allen Fiber Arts, in Great Barrington, Mass., for which she designs colorful, hand-knit sweaters, scarves and hats.
The different teachers stage a crude laboratory-experiment in how to turn around the half a million kids like this in Britain.
Now the parents at the Parkside Federation, which includes two secondary schools in the centre of the city, are helping teachers stage a mini-revolution.
The New York teams, which started in 2003 with a handful of women skating under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, include teachers, stage managers, accountants, a lion keeper, corporate lawyers and an antiques dealer, as well as the one known astronomer.
Truck drivers and teachers staged a strike in the Andean city of Cuzco, a Toledo stronghold.
Two weeks earlier, at the beginning of the most important vacation of the year, the teachers staged a protest on the same highway for more than nine hours, creating chaos for travelers.
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy's bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track.
It is the second time this year the president's visit to the region coincides with a sickout: during his visit in January, Detroit teachers staged the demonstration in protest of poor school conditions.
Teachers staged sick-outs in protest against what they saw as Tea Party mission creep on the board, and then students in the thousands began walk-outs across the county.
On November 26th, 1,000 schools in London were closed to pupils as teachers staged a one-day strike to double their London allowances to the £6,000 paid to police officers.In itself, a rise in public-sector earnings of 5% or so would not be a disaster for the economy next year.
On Monday, the teachers staged a rally in Charleston, the state capital, at which they wore red shirts (some also wore red bandannas) to echo the chosen costume of the picketing mine workers of the Battle of Blair Mountain, in 1921, the largest strike in American history.
