Infamous world leader resurrected in ‘Britannicus’

Susan Daniels

Being the most powerful man in the world may be enticing for many, but for New York actor Alfredo Narciso, the experience has a tendency to bleed into his personal life.

“I’m having more nightmares. Partly, it’s the stress of the role — a hefty part that asks a lot of an actor,” said Narciso, who plays the infamous Roman emperor Nero in “Britannicus,” Jean Racine’s 18th century classic, running at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge through next week. Full story

‘Apartheid’ traces history of racist experimentation

Kam Williams

“The experimental exploitation of African-Americans is not an issue of the last decade or even the past few decades. Dangerous, involuntary, and non-therapeutic experimentation of African-Americans has been practiced widely and documented extensively at least since the 18th Century... The problem is growing — No other group as deeply mistrusts the American medical system.

“These subjects were given experimental vaccines known to have unacceptably high lethality, were enrolled in experiments without their consent or knowledge, were subjected to surreptitious surgical and medical procedures while unconscious, injected with toxic substances, deliberately monitored rather than treated for deadly ailments, excluded from lifesaving treatments, or secretly farmed for sera or tissues that were used to perfect technologies such as infectious disease tests.”

— Excerpted from the Introduction Full story

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Boston Scenes

Sweet Honey keep roots alive through music

Bridgit Brown

The mission of the African American female a cappella sextet known as Sweet Honey in the Rock is twofold: to keep alive some of the vocal music traditions of the African American journey — from Africa to the Middle Passage to slavery to migration to the civil rights movement; and to expand that already rich repertoire with new sounds. Full story

Author’s African trek leads to identity crisis

Kam Williams

“If in the era of the [slave] trade the enslaved had been forced to forget mother, now their descendants were being encouraged to do the impossible and reclaim her … Under the stewardship of Shell Oil, USAID, and a consortium of North American universities, the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and the Museum and Monuments Board crafted a story for the ten thousand black tourists who visited the country every year hungering for knowledge of slave ancestors. Tourism provided a ready response with a tale of the Atlantic slave trade as a distinctly African-American story … Local cottage industries in slave route tourism began sprouting up all over Ghana … Every town or village had an atrocity to promote — a mass grave, an auction block, a slave river, a massacre. It was Ghana’s equivalent to a fried chicken franchise.

— Excerpted from Chapter Eight, “Lose Your Mother” Full story