Audiences simply go out of their minds at this multi-Tony nominated, acrobatic exercise with its single utilitarian set and its "power to the people" theme.
This pattern of responses revealed people's strong underlying preference for a "utilitarian" set of rules designed to maximize lives saved and minimize deaths — with one big exception.
Frank Knox's utilitarian set helps the play along without being intrusive.
The City Opera's utilitarian set, borrowed from the Sherwin Goldman production of the mid-1980's, will jibe with most people's image of Catfish Row: a courtyard, ships' masts in the background, three houses, one of which rotates to an interior.
They gather in restaurants, hospital rooms, apartments and Central Park, but the action of the play is commentary; there's a persistent stasis onstage that is so apparent it has to be purposeful, and it is underscored by a spare and utilitarian set by Eugene Lee that leaves great swaths of space for speech to fill.
One example is the old Postbahnhof, an abandoned, utilitarian train station set in a fast-changing, post-industrial landscape in the old East, beside one of the longest surviving stretches of the Berlin Wall.
Codification Proposal, Addressed … to all Nations Professing Liberal Opinions (1822) was intended to advertise his credentials as a codifier of law to politicians and statesmen around the world, first by setting down the utilitarian principles of an "all-comprehensive" code, and second by providing testimonials to his aptitude for the task of codification (1998, 241 384; see also Lieberman 2011).
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination.
My colleagues who do "experimental philosophy" love to harass subjects with Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem, which elicits non-utilitarian intuitions that set our teeth on edge.
But sometimes the cutoff is set for utilitarian reasons: We don't want to hurt young people, but we also don't want young people to hurt us.
