Review

Michael Moore has wrestled with Congress, insurance companies, the National Rifle Association, General Motors, and various players in the “military-industrial complex."

But Goliath has never been this big…

Next year marks the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Still, the country seems forever in flux. Two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, present views of Mexico that not only differ from each other, but also from the pictures we’re used to seeing on travel brochures and in magazines.

Art is often subversive. Hitler knew it. Stalin knew it. And Mao Zedong knew it. Dictators regard ideas expressed by art for art’s sake as a threat. They use art as propaganda, a tool to glorify the state. They prevent artists who do not hew to the party line from exhibiting their work in public. Some of the groundbreaking Chinese artists who made the works currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, still aren’t allowed to show in their own country.

I was surprised to find myself at “Defending the Caveman,” – a long-running one-man comedy show written by Rob Becker that brags about looking at relationships between the genders “without taking sides.” Starring Michael Van Osch, who has been doing this since 2004, it is playing at the Wilbur Theatre through March 15. Based, as my companion put it, on “the humor of recognition,” this performance piece claims to be “the longest running solo play in Broadway history,” and has been translated into 16 languages and performed around the world by a variety of comics.