Roux
Roux () is flour and fat cooked together and used to thicken sauces. Roux is typically made from equal parts of flour and fat by weight. The flour is added to the melted fat or oil on the stove top, blended until smooth, and cooked to the desired level of brownness. Butter, vegetable oils, bacon drippings or lard are commonly used fats. Roux is used as a thickening agent for gravy, sauces, soups and stews. It provides the base for a dish, and other ingredients are added after the roux is complete.
Talk (play)
"Carl Hancock Rux's dazzling new play "Talk" takes us back to the golden age when the panel was the best theater of ideas around. There's an intellectual riot going on in New York, and we're part of it. History matters. Art matters. High ideals and monstrous ambitions are at stake. So is the nature of truth. (Whose truth?) We laugh at the in-jokes and pick up the dropped names (Kerouac, Vidal, Maya Deren, Godard, Wayne Shorter, John Lee Hooker). We switch sides, play games of deference and one-upmanship with each panelist. For them, it's a fight to the social or psychic death. For us, it's suspense and excitement. The occasion is this: a lost writer of the 1950s (fictional) has been found...He was tormented by fame and by the struggle between art and politics. He turned his novel, "Mother and Son," into an avant-garde film, led a demonstration at a museum and, when it turned violent, went to jail and died there, probably a suicide. His reputation languished until the eager young Moderator (played by Anthony Mackie) found his novel in dusty basement archives. The panel is set in a mythic Museum of Antiquities...with a backdrop of blue sky that can take on the color of red dust or of night. Ancient statues and vases lie about. And there are words, the words of artists and philosophers, across the floor and up the steps of the theater. In three vehement hours, "Talk" roams through the 1950s and 60's: the cold war, Abstract Expressionism, jazz, New Wave films, the civil rights movement, rebel intellectuals, Vietnam, and the media—as it converts all of this into marketable or unmarketable art and history. We argue, too, in our heads about aesthetics, the meaning of race and of civilization when its discontents become brutal punishments. What are the possibilities for transformation? Mr. Rux has given "Talk" an elaborate classical frame. The ancient still resonates. Mr. Rux's ideas have the urgency and passion of actions. He draws on satire, rhetoric, naturalism (the kind, Strindberg said, that "seeks out the points where great battles take place"), and poetry.""New York Times"