Theater: Puppets with Purpose
CenterStage offers up a fine rendition of ‘Avenue Q’
‘Avenue Q’
A CenterStage production. Continues through April 28. Directed by John R. Leffert. For tickets and information, go to centerstagejcc.org, call 459-0660, or check at the Jewish Community Center, 3600 Dutchmans Lane.
Imagine a world without irony.
If you were trying to conjure up a society completely different from contemporary America, that’s what you’d want to create. Verbal irony, the mindful strategy of saying one thing in order to convey something quite different, is so deeply embedded in American culture (and often so clumsily executed) that future scholars (if there are any) will need acres of computer servers to hold the footnotes (if such things still exist) to explain just the works of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Developmental psychologists say that children, once thought incapable of using or parsing irony before the age of 10, now start using it by the age of 4 and are masters by the time they enter primary school.