"In the 1990's Sarah Schulman saw the relevance of the McCarthy era to contemporary American life, and the impact of its unaddressed consequences. But with an innovative vision, she chose to transpose the classic tropes of 1940's and 50's American cinema by positioning a Black straight man and a Queer Jewish woman as the emblematic Americans, through whose eyes we revisit our nation's complex past. Set before the advent of the collective revolutionary movements of the 1960's these individuals, Cal and Sylvia want the promise of The American Dream, and find out the hard way that - alone- it is not available to them. Using set pieces of mid-century Americana: The Steno Pool, The Stork Club, The Bar and Grill, and snappy comebacks of film noir, Schulman was decades ahead in reimagining whose stories could tell the collective history"--