Parabasis

Flop Sweat

by 99 Seats

A few years back, Cats was going to close and it was kind of a big deal (For you youngsters out there, there used to be a Broadway show about singing cats. No, I'm not talking about The Lion King.) I hadn't seen it and neither had my roommate, a big musical theatre fan, and he was pushing me to go see it before it closed. I refused. My argument then was: "I missed Angels in America when it ran on Broadway, so I can't justify making an effort to see Cats." All of which was true. But it wasn't quite the truth.

Anyone who knows me, or has seen my DVD collection, knows I like bad movies. Jeez, last year I saw Legion. In the theatre. And I nearly went to see Orphan. I like me some bad, terrible, trainwreck movies. Some, I even wind up loving, like Joe Vs. The Volcano or Bubba Ho-Tep. Others...well...they're just a good time. Spending two hours watching Nic Cage in a ridiculous wig? My idea of fun.

But bad theatre? Nope. I hate it. I hate the very concept of it. Not so-bad-it's-good theatre or tongue-in-cheek cheese, like Toxic Avenger (which I had a blast at), but clanking failures? I can't do it. A theatre teacher I had in college told me that theatre must justify its theft of time. Theatre, he argued, was a time-intensive, not at all convenient, required dressing up (back in the day, anyways). It asked a lot of its audience and needed to repay that with worth. This has stuck with me and leaves me irrationally angry at bad theatre. It smacks of disrespect to me. So I don't like to seek out flops or trainwrecks or even popular eyesores. I understand the fascination. But I hold back. A couple of seasons back, I saw a absolute horror of a trainwreck of a disaster. I never walk out and I did. Mostly because the actors seemed so embarassed and I was embarassed for them and couldn't stand the idea of sitting there while they took their bows to an unhappy house. That's how I deal with theatrical failures.

However. There's this. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody.

Now my several parts are in total conflict. I'm a comic book geek, so I want to check it out. It sounds like a technical mess/marvel, and the tech geek wants to check it out. I feel like there is still a chance for it to be transcendently good. (The comic book geek wants that, too.) And the cranky theatre guy wants to see it...so that he may rag on it more eloquently. But mostly...I kind of just feel sorry for it. For the folks involved. For the folks who do see it. As much as I like schadenfreude, it's not a justification for the theft of time. Somewhere, deep in me, is still a bit of reverence for what we do, a desire for it to be taken seriously. Things like this work against that.

So...I don't know. If someone offered me a free ticket, would I go? Would you? Would you pay for it? On TDF? Pop quiz, kid: What. Would. You. Do?

Meanwhile...

...In post-racial America....

The Times Did Nothing Wrong

By Isaac Butler

I'm already sick of the nontroversy surrounding Patrick Healy's article in the Times about Spider-Man.  I'm not a huge Healy fan, but he really did nothing wrong here. It's an eyewitness, journalistic account by the Times' theatre reporter that appears as a news item, not a review and that goes out of its way to make no aesthetic judgement on what happened on stage and instead just report what happened. 

The first preview of the much-delayed, rumored-to-be-disastrous, most expensive musical ever made is news. The Times did nothing wrong by covering it, nor do I feel, contra Playgoer that this is some kind of tawdry bid for the All That Chat crowd. All That Chat is a cesspool of bitchery about
things like the prices at Lincoln Center's concession stand. Patrick Healy went and did some actual (if perhaps lightweight) reporting. And given how much ad revenue at the Times' theatre section is driven by big Broadway shows, I'm glad that the Times chose to print it.

For more, direct your browsers to Matt Freeman.

A Liberal Plan For Balancing The Budget

By Isaac Butler

It seems that our big national conversation over the next year or two is going to be the deficit.  In this conversation there are... really... zero prominent liberal voices advancing a leftish vision of how to balance the budget over the next twenty years.  

Instead, we have a Right Wing party that exploded the deficit and wrecked our economy teaming up with the "centrists" who have made it more and more unfair and deregulated over the last twenty years to call on the most vulnerable members of our society to "Sacrifice."  And indeed, the fetishization of "sacrifice," as some kind of inherently Good and Noble thing is in the air (et tu, Culturefuture? A GS-1 federal government employee makes under $20,000 a year unless they live in one of a handful of cities.)

Might I offer instead that people interested in this issue on all sides of the political spectrum take a gander at Our Fiscal Security's plan for balancing the budget? Hell, if you don't want to read the whole thing, take a gander at the executive summary. It even has charts!

 They balance the budget largely by cutting defense spending, containing health care cost growth, closing tax loopholes and taxing carbon consumption. There's even some tax cuts and additional stimulus worked in there.

This plan needs to be part of our national conversation.  The Simpson/Bowles commission-- if it emerges with a consensus at all-- is going to propose a Right Wing plan dressed up in centrist language (how do I know? the plan requires no liberal votes, there aren't really any liberals on the commission and they've preemptively capped the size of government at an arbitrary number). 

So take a moment and read the plan. Or read this summary of another progressive plan that doesn't use "sacrifice" as a way of selling passing costs on to the most vulnerable in our society. 

Today is Call Congress Day for Social Security Works. Perhaps you would like to sign up, take a few minutes and tell your elected representatives to protect social security?  Maybe you can mention the plan while you're at it. 

Feeling States

Sure, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but why do we listen to them? The reasons are probably as various as the numbers of listeners. Frequently, the reasons we might decide “I’d like to commingle with the piece of art,” end up having no bearing on the actual experience. Lately, I’ve been thinking about one of these kinds of experiences, namely when we go to a play, or read a book or see a film or (verb) a (medium of art) and it ends up calling up in us some kind of profound emotional state that lasts, like a hangover, for hours (or even days) after its done.

The obvious one that most readers of this blog have probably experienced a few times is the state of vertiginous aliveness brought on by truly outstanding theatre. That feeling state wherein the volume of the universe feels turned up, while its EQ is perfectly balanced. That feeling where—whenever you get out of the theatre—you feel more awake than you’ve felt in years. Oliver Butler (no relation) talks about that feeling while seeing Gatz for the first time here. I remember that feeling most distinctly from seeing Angels in America on Broadway, both parts in two days (an experience Rob Weinert-Kendt discusses here as well).

Imagine being addicted to something you only experience on every handful of years. Chasing that fix lead me to all sorts of darkened, sordid rooms, where I sought in vain to find it. For those of us in the audience who’ve tasted that experience, sometimes its difficult not to lump all theatre into three categories. Theatre that provides that feeling, bad theatre and the squishy pretty-good middle. I worry that working in theatre has robbed me of this experience. I go to shows that others have found this exhilarating and notice moments of weak blocking, shitty pacing, miscalled light cues.

At the same time, one thing I’ve noticed is that it is not necessarily perfection that brings on this feeling. After all, Angels is hardly perfect, particularly in its second part. I saw the Civilians workshop of (I Am) Nobody’ Lunch, which was a giant mess, but it managed to call up a complex nest of feelings in me that the far more polished final version could not. The final version was a “better” show, but I loved the former one for what it did to me.

And what did it do to me? I guess we could say that what it did was move me. I was moved. The show transported me from one state of being to another, and it did it so profoundly that it took me some time to return to where I was.

Of course, that alive feeling is not the only one we encounter. I found Chris Shinn’s Dying City moving. But not moving like “I was moved to tears.” Rather I happened to see this play about selfish, damaged, broken people and the wake of busted relationships they leave happened to come less than twenty four hours after a huge row between Anne and myself. Observing the slowly-rotating stage, and the dual-twin performance of Pablo Schreiber, the play became a trail of breadcrumbs leading inward, into my own selfishness and brokenness.

I could list other plays, movies, books etc. that have moved me to similar long-lasting feeling states. Part of why I love (but will never see again) The Constant Gardener is that the film’s use of suspected infidelity as a catalyst to solving its larger mysteries resonated profoundly. I am little like Ralph Fiennes’ character in that film, yet saw myself in him again and again. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s Aftermath became a forum to summon the admixture of righteous indignation and shame that I feel over the War in Iraq.

Mike Daisey recently talked about art as being “a static field in which to share truth,” and one of those truths encounterable in that field is emotional. There are all sorts of other ones, of course. And artists are frequently skeptical of the emotional angle to all of this. It’s understandable; we’re afraid of simply manipulating—and of being manipulated— in the negative sense. But in our zeal not to be manipulative (or manipulated) we also grow skeptical of the value of creating spaces within our art where people can be truly moved in complex ways.

It is specifically because it creates this kind of space that I love the comic book of The Walking Dead, and its taken watching (and ultimately, not loving) the TV show to figure that out. Simply put, for me, The Walking Dead has been a static field in which I can encounter loss on a profound level.

Ultimately, it is this feeling of loss in all of its complexities, with its odd sweet flavors of gratitude and there-but-for-ness stirred in with more bitter notes of fear, desperation and grief that keeps me coming back to Kirkman and Adlard’s comic. It’s not the characters, it’s not the fairly realistic take on how people would behave at the apocalypse. It’s not the stories being told. It’s not the ethical dilemmas that Kirkman constantly provokes the reader with. It’s certainly not the bleakness of his vision, and it’s definitely not the dialogue. It’s the way all of the above (and more) combine.

I don’t read The Walking Dead month-to-month because I don’t think it would have this affect on me. Instead, I read it in large chunks, several volumes at a time. Often, by the time I’m done binging, I am wide awake and my wife is asleep beside me. And in these moments, I want to wake her up, and tell her I love her and tell her how lost I’d be if I lost her, and how grateful I am that we have each other and all the other things that losing a loved one makes you want to say to your loved ones. And I get to experience these things, to encounter them and be changed by them and think about how I want to be in relationship to them.

The TV show does none of this. And I think that’s why—even though it’s well made—I am so disappointed in it. This is also why (now that it appears to be turning into Lost plus zombies) I probably won’t be returning to it next season. They’re not giving me what I came to the source material for, and in its place, they haven’t added anything to it. Once you get beyond the thrill of seeing a serialized zombie narrative in all its gory glory on television, it is unclear why we should keep watching the show, particularly for those of us who know (in a broad-stroke way) where it’s going.

Ultimately, of course, this kind of way of discussing art only gets us so far. The way art moves the viewer is intensely personal, and has as much to do with the audience member as it does with the art itself. Instead, these moments become motivational tools for further investigation and criticism. We fall in love with how the work of art makes us feel, and decide to revere it through allowing it to make us think.

You Should Be On Broadway

The Walking Dead: Things to be Thankful for this Thanksgiving

Written by Clay McLeod Chapman

     Things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving: A television series about zombies.

     Since it’s the holidays I’m going to be a bit more free and loose with my entry. Who the hell’s gonna read this anyways? Nobody, that’s who! Unless there’s a cabal of trolls looking to spend their Thanksgiving scrolling through the annals of Parabasis, I think I may be here all on my lonesome… So I’m gonna speak my mind and finally say all the things I’ve wanted to say about The Walking Dead. Ha! Take that, turkey-eaters!

     My wife and I have watched The Walking Dead together every Sunday thus far. During the pilot episode, my wife – whose name will rename nameless (to protect the innocent), who is not a horror enthusiast at all, not one iota – turned to me with a frown and said: I’d be really sad if one of us turned into a zombie and we had to shoot the other…

     It’s one of those statements that, taken out of context, sounds a bit silly. Sure. But it was a sincere moment between us, given the fact that we’d just watched a scene where a man is faced with probably one of the more heartbreaking decisions an individual might encounter in the midst of a zombie apocalypse: Shooting a recently-zombified loved one.

     As fleeting as the moment was between my wife and I, it provides a solid example of what The Walking Dead – what all good TV, really – does best: Thrusts us viewers into a situation where we are compelled to ask ourselves what we would do.

     I’ve read here and elsewhere a certain prickly double-edged sword from those who defend The Walking Dead: When the series hits a high-point, we fans will say – This is the best show ever. When it hits a low-point, though, we protect ourselves behind the armor of – Come on, guys. It’s just a zombie show…

     I don’t know, though. Right now The Walking Dead is straddling this strange liminal space for me, where it’s difficult to tell if the show wants to be an ensemble drama with zombies or if it’s a zombie show with disposable characters. With the graphic novel, it was a no-brainer: The massively expansive length of the comic has provided Kirkman the ability to tell an extended story that really allowed readers to get to know these characters in and out. The fact that his characters were immersed in a zombie epidemic was (nearly) secondary to the continuing storylines of his survivors, their struggles to forge ahead in a new world. Not that the zombies were incidental – they were just a component to the world as it stood now. Natural. Organic. But Kirkman always put his characters first. When somebody the reader had gotten to know over the course of the comic suddenly got his throat ripped out, there was a strong sense of loss – akin to Bambi’s mom getting shot.

     The television series, however, hasn’t reached this level of empathy yet. It can. I remain a firm believer that it will. But it hasn’t yet. (Save for the pilot.) I was a bit disheartened by the opening daddy-was-a-fisherman exchange between the two sisters at the beginning of this last episode. Even more confounding is the fact that it’s the first episode written by Kirkman himself…

     The Walking Dead should not be just a zombie show. I want to be bold and say it should be judged just the same as The Sopranos was. Would any defender of The Sopranos say, whenever that show fumbled – Come on, guys. It’s just a mafia show…

     The Walking Dead has time on its side. What television series in general have the potential of achieving is the kind of longevity that allows its viewers to get to know its characters inside and out, to spend time with them, fall in love with them a little – and then have our hearts broken when we watch them die. It’s a cruel trick, but it makes for compelling TV. The best example that I can think of is Joss Whedon’s phenomenal Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was, and remain, a huge Buffy fan. Anyone who calls Buffy “just a vampire show” should have their turkey burn in the oven today. The vampire-motif allowed Whedon an opportunity to talk about feelings of alienation in high school (among other things) with a pitch-perfect sense of whimsy that has yet to be matched. The fact that there were vampires and demons and all other kinds of beasties running around the halls of Sunnydale High blended in with the jocks and cheerleaders and everybody else. But Whedon followed the Faulkner model: Kill your darlings. No character is sacred enough to survive just for the sake of keeping them on the air.

      It’s about time that some characters started dying on The Walking Dead. But none of the characters that perished last Sunday earned my heart.

     They can though. I know they can. Quoting Faulkner around the fire won’t do it. Creating real characters will. Telling a good story will.

     The first episode did. Will the finale?

     To end, I’ll say this: I consider Isaac Butler to be one of my closest friends. It saddens me to think of him all the way out there in the Midwest these days, given the fact that – if and when the zombie apocalypse hits – we won’t be together to establish our own colony of survivors and repopulate the world with our Isaac-Clay babies. There’s no way I’d be able to get back to Isaac out in Minnesota. Since I’m in New York, I’m guessing I’m as good as dead anyways. I wouldn’t even make it out of my own apartment, I bet.

     I told my wife, weeks back, during our Sunday ritual of watching The Walking Dead – if I was to turn into a zombie, she could, and should, shoot me.

     Right in the head.

Admission By Lottery

Remember way back when when someone (Scott Walters, I'm pretty sure) proposed the idea of creating seasons by lottery?  Basically, theaters would put a bunch of scripts that fit some (admittedly subjective) standards of quality or whatever into a big pile and then pretty much pick them by random?

Reaction was not warm to this idea, if I remember correctly.

What do you all think about a similar idea applied to elite Universities? 

 

Some will no doubt object that this will undermine the “excellence” of Harvard’s student body. It will, and that’s exactly the point. For one thing, “excellence” in the Harvard admissions process—and at Harvard—has a lot less to do with virtuous character traits than with an ability to game the system. By placing a premium on students who go above and beyond in extracurricular realms, Harvard has attracted a number of truly incredible people but has also encouraged a high school arms race wherein kids cram their schedules with activities in an attempt to attract admissions officers.

 

By selecting for this kind of behavior, the admissions process doesn’t encourage real excellence, but, to use the novelist Walter Kirn’s term from his hilarious book and essay “Lost in the Meritocracy,” “aptitude for showing aptitude.” This may well be of use in students’ careers after college, but it is orthogonal if not antithetical to the goals of a liberal arts education.

But let us accept for a second that the system is not wholly corrupted and that there is a connection between “excellence” in the admissions context and real excellence or that such a connection can at least be achieved within a traditional admissions process. Even granting all that, why should the richest university in the world be devoting its resources to educating students who are already “excellent?”

Yglesias has commentary here, which is where I found the article, if you're interested. 

A Trope I'm Done With

By Isaac Butler

Look, there was probably next to no chance I was going to see Love and Other Drugs to begin with. But this (positive!) review put the nail in the coffin with this paragraph:

A smoothly coiffed preppie from a doctor's family (his parents are played by George Segal and Jill Clayburgh, in what I believe is her final screen role), Jamie is much too sure of himself with girls, gear and money, but Gyllenhaal somehow stops him just short of being unforgivably odious. Maybe what we can see below the surface is what Parkinson's patient Maggie Murdock (Hathaway) also sees -- even after Jamie gets a close look at her breast under false pretenses and she responds by decking him in a parking lot. He's not a decent guy at the moment, even by the standards of antidepressant salesmen in Cleveland. But he might be a decent guy in embryo.

Blerg. I am not sure I can put into words how fed up I am by the whole "the guy's an asshole, but the woman sees something in him and through fucking him a lot, redeems him" thing. And furthermore, I'm a bit fed up by male critics not realizing that this is blatant wish-fulfillment for male audiences .  At least reviewers seem to have figured out that Anne Hathaway's character (a terminally-ill redeemer who likes to fuck a lot but might not want to be in love who changes Jake Gyllenhaal for the better) is a cardboard construct. 

Back when the second Twilight film came out, there was a lot of talk about the fantasy that those movies sell young women. Bella is, essentially, a character without qualities, entirely passive, uninteresting and devoid of personality who men throw themselves at because it turns out she has some kind of secret power that fascinates them.  This is the man-child equivalent of that fantasy, and I'm sick of watching it.  It's perfectly possible to construct a romantic comedy (or weepy, for that matter) without it. Furthermore, while I think this is meant to be an exaggeration of something many of us feel-- that we are improved, and to some extent redeemed, by our successful relationships-- this trope lacks even the vaguest whiff of actual truthful perceptiveness about relationships, or life, or men and women. 

In short, this morning I'm appreciating Greenberg more and more.

The Walking Dead: A Good Villain

I actually disagree with 99. I think the fourth episode was the best since the pilot. Sure, some of the writing was kind of obvious, but so what? It's not Mad Men, it's a show about zombies.

Warning: spoilers.

Here's where 99 and I agree: the Merle storyline is amazing. From the moment the found his severed hand on the roof I was hooked, and watching them trace his steps through the blood he's lost and the carnage he's waged, only to have their van stolen by him was genuinely frightening.

What's most frightening about Merle is that we haven't seen him. He's become a spectre, almost like Michael Myers through the majority of Halloween or Billy from Black Christmas. How gone is he mentally? What is he preparing to do? This was the first episode that has frightened me since the pilot, and that's a good thing.

There's a moment in the episode when asshole abusive husband is lying in his tent when he hears a shuffling outside. I had a pit in my stomach because I thought it was Merle. When it turned out to be just a walker I was actually releived. That, my friend, is a really nice trick of the writing.

My question is: what's next? Where did that horde of zombies come from? Are we meant to beleive that Merle is nearby and that he led them to the campsite from Atlanta either by accident or on purpose? What do you think?

God, I hope so. I love a good soap opera and, more than that, I love a good villain. Here's hoping that Merle is the one handed Alexis Carrington of The Walking Dead!

The Walking Dead Roundtable: Vatos

by 99 Seats

(Spoilers ahoy! Read on with caution!)

Yeah, okay, the nursing home angle was pretty good. Didn't really see it coming and I liked how it played on both our assumptions and the characters. A bunch of tattooed, gun-toting snarling Latinos are obviously a gang...of orderlies and nurses watching over an abandoned nursing home residents. This time, most definitely, the spectre of Katrina enters the story.

As Isaac said, this was the most heavy-handed and probably worst written episode so far. Full of awkward foreshadowing and laying-it-on-thick, the exposition is bald and flat. The first scene reads like a terrible scene from a first year playwriting student. After the reveal of the truth about the gang's real mission, we get an absurbly long and talky scene drawing big red circles around the series' already pretty clear theme: how do we build society after disaster? Or, as Cuse and Lindelof put, live together, die alone. Not a useless philosophy...but not the most surprising.

There were great grace notes throughout. Merle was just a redneck creep before, but now...man, I'm kind of terrified of him. It's great that in a series about zombies running rampant, they've created a pretty convincing boogyman out of a one-handed guy with a grudge. In TV trope 1001, the recognizable guest star will turn out to be important. You don't use Michael Rooker for just a couple of episodes. (Have you seen Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer?) I can't wait for him to just pop up.

Speaking of popping up, the climatic zombie attack was a nice surprise and pretty engaging. Like the little survivor gang, we'd gotten pretty complacent about the fact that there are zombies everywhere. They're chasing Merle, we think his vengenance is something to scared off, but then, BAM, here's a ton of zombies for you. They chew some red-shirts and one of the principal cast and we get a tearful farewell. A nice finish on the episode. Well, if you ignore the weird, maybe-psychic foreshadowing thing. Which I'm hoping isn't going to be a thing. It definitely doesn't belong in this world. So...you know, don't make it a thing, show.

It's weird that this first "season" is almost over. Interestingly, one of the frustrating things that I found about the trade paperbacks was the same thing: they only collected about six issues per trade, so you never got a full story arc. This looks like the show is moving in the same direction. I fear it's going to be a bit painful when it just ends. Thankfully, it'll be coming back.

The Walking Dead: Kirkman Arrives

By Isaac Butler

Warning: Spoilers (but only about this episode)

Hello All,

Well, this was the first episode to actually be scripted by comic book creator Robert Kirkman, and thus I'm back to thinking about adaptation. I think the reason why this fascinates me so much is that-- now that I'm pursuing an MFA in a genre/medium (creative nonfiction) completely different from the genre/medium (theatre) that I spent most of time interacting with-- I've become pretty obsessed with what works in what form and how.

And this episode is interesting on those grounds because it has all the hallmarks of a Kirkman joint.  

First off, it's weepy.  There's a surprising (and refreshing) amount of crying in the comic books.  Heck, there's one issue that is literally just three characters crying for like 32 pages as they rehash decisions they've made that they regret.  This episode began and ended in tears.  

Second, the text is monologue-driven. Did you notice how many speeches there were? And how often scenes were basically setups for speeches? Even the first scene between Andrea and Amy felt like two monologues that had been cut up and put together. The comic is basically a series of monologues and reaction shots (ooo boy does Kirkman love reaction shots) punctuated by the occasional dialogue and/or extreme act of violence.

Third, there's a constant desire to upend our expectations of who characters we meet are, and playful references to people's old jobs (Michonne, don't forget, was a corporate lawyer).  

Fourth, the centering of every plot around some central how are we going to be in this world now that there is no society dilemma.

And of course fourth, there's the willingness to kill off just about anybody, if it serves the story needs.  I had forgotten how early in the series Amy dies until I went back and reread them.  Earlier, I expressed my worry to Clay that, since they hadn't killed any main characters off by episode three, they would lack the stones to go through with killing a young teenage girl.  I was happy to be proven wrong on that score.

Also, Glenn's "I'm Korean!" line was both hilarious, and finally cleared up a question about Glenn that I had had for a long time...

So how did I end up feeling about this most Kirmany of episodes?  Overall, I liked it. Mainstream comic books and TV have a lot more in common than, say, comics and film or theatre and TV do, and I think Kirkman's skill set as a writer made a pretty easy transition to this new medium. I will say, it was the episode that felt the most obviously "written." The rest of the episodes thus far have been aiming for as transparent (and minimal) a writing style as possible.  Darabont and Kirkman have both said in interviews that one major change from comic to TV has been pairing down how much is spoken.  Comic books actually don't have that much room for text to begin with (although TWD is famously wordy), and this stripping away has lead to a show with a lot of silences and lurking glares instead of long speeches. 

The only things I really didn't go for art the opener in the fish boat and the dream that comes true. The second feels totally out of place in the world they've created. If you're trying to build a show where the idea is that other than the zombie apocalypse frame things progress as realistically as possible, having some Battlestar ass bullshit like a dream that comes true (down, we're supposed to think, to the number of graves) totally shatters the faith you build up from the viewers. One thing that derailed Battlestar was the sense that the show had no rules, and that anything the writers wanted to happen or be true, they'd retcon in, right down to putting scenes in the Previously On that never happened in the show.  I don't think quasi-mystical stuff has much of a place in The Walking Dead, and I hope they just did it this one time for atmosphere.

As for the first... it just felt like a parody of "serious TV dialogue."  The symbolism was so forced, and so obvious, and so underlined by the text. Ugh. Awful. 

What did you guys think of the gang-that-runs-a-nursing-home?  I enjoyed it, and thought it played with our expectations and stereotypes about TV Mexicans in interesting ways. 

James Salter at the University of Minnesota

By Isaac Butler

1. The Author’s Author takes the stage, introduced by another author. He is advanced in years, and rumored to be such a perfectionist that he only likes one of his books. The book of his that he is rumored to like is basically about fucking. The book that he is most famous for is about two rich people who fall into despair for no discernable reason, yet somehow it works.
2. The Author’s Author is here to give a lecture. Lecture is defined broadly, so broadly it has no meaning. The Author’s Author—like the other writers brought here for this purpose—is allowed to do whatever the heck he wants. He clears his throat. He is about to begin.
3. The Author’s Author’s original last name is Horowitz. He changed it. This had to be looked up out of fear that one of his books was anti-Semitic.
4. The Author’s Author served in Korea. He flew planes. He remained in the Air Force for a time after that before leaving it to write. The Author’s Author’s first book was about the Air Force. He loved flying. He hated Hollywood. He particularly hated Charlotte Rampling and is famous for complaining about her body order. This came later, after many books, after he became an Author’s Author.
5. The Author’s Author clears his throat. He announces that he is going to speak extemporaneously about the publishing industry for a time and then read a chapter from his work in progress. It has never been read out loud before. The audience seems not to grasp the gravity of this situation. This is a special treat. They are hearing these sacred, not-fully-revised words for a book that has no set publication date for one of the most highly regarded (if not well known) writers alive.
6. (Seeing him up at the podium, it becomes unclear whether he will live to finish the novel. Not that he seems ill, just frail.)
7. The Author’s Author’s talk of the publishing industry is optimistic and unfilled with fear of the Internet. He believes, based on conversations he has had with editors in the field, that the large publishing house is probably doomed, but that this is not a bad thing. Like many who make a living but not a killing in publishing, he is quick to bring up that the large houses are all owned by four multinational corporations, many based in Germany. He believes that the changing of the publication model will shake out to groups of aesthetically like-minded editors—perhaps six or eight—running smaller publishing houses without centralized offices. Publishing books, he says, was never a great money making business to begin with.
8. The idea is that these smaller groups will be less inclined towards the Big Seller that subsidizes all the Not Big Sellers. The larger houses—and its worth saying that the Author’s Author is published by one of them—use the big sellers much the same way that record companies use U2 or Metallica. They are the goose laying the golden egg that allows for the midlist. The problem is, you never know if a Big Book is going to turn out to be a Big Book. Thousands and thousands of dollars go down the drain chasing the Next Big Book. The Author’s Author suggests a world in which the midlist is king, with fewer Event Books, fewer Grishams, fewer Franzens.
9. The future looks if not bright at least acceptable for The Author’s Author. Why not, then, delve a bit into the book, the book that is not finished yet? The first chapter of the book is solid, not spectacular. It sets up some interesting characters and the beginning of the story, on a ship in the Pacific in WWII. The book will follow the protagonist through his whole life, starting at that moment. It is loosely inspired by a quote from Christopher Hitchens, of all people.
10. And then polite applause and it is Q+A time. The Author’s Author does not want to—in fact refuses to—discuss politics. Someone brings up the Firebombing of Tokyo—an event mentioned offhandedly in the chapter—and he responds I don’t want to get in to all that. The Author’s Author’s work is political in the way that people who don’t want to talk about politics write political work. It is small-c conservative, largely about wealthy elites, and it neither questions nor actively interrogates privilege (be it white, male or monied). It’s the conservatism of, say, Much Ado About Nothing, rather than the Conservatism of The O’Reilly Factor, and at its best approaches the beauty and expansive quality of the former.
11. When asked a question, the Author’s Author repeats it, seemingly ornery. He is deaf in one ear. He repeats the questions so that he can make sure he heard them right, but it sounds like he’s so offended by the question that he has to repeat it over and over again in disbelief. What am I reading? That’s what you’re asking me? What am I reading? This person wants to know what I am reading.
12. He does not read fiction when writing, for fear of influence. You don’t want to be influenced! He says. Yes you do! The person sitting next to me whispers. She elaborates that she will have to tell her students to completely ignore his advice. It is pretty much all wrong for young writers, who should encounter their influences as often as possible.
13. And then, like the ephemeral meals that he compares to life in the title of one of his books, it is over. The questions are done, and it is time to get our books signed and eat canapés, and marvel at the longevity and career the Author’s Author has had. After all, only one of the Author’s Author’s books sold more than 10K copies in its initial hardcover run. Were he not a living embodiment of prestige, had he tried today to use his crystalline prose to fashion a niche for himself at one of the large publishing houses whose demise he Cassandra’ed, he probably would not have succeeded. He probably would be on Dalkey, not Vintage.
14. It’s hard to believe in this moment that the future really holds more space for author’s authors like The Author’s Author, but the gathered students here in the inner lobby drinking coffee and bemoaning that others have already eaten the hot dish desperately want to believe that the demise of the Big House will in fact give forth to the rise of the Small House, that maybe there will be a place for all of us, a less remunerative one, perhaps, but a place nonetheless.

Down The Tubes

by 99 Seats

Jason Zinoman in the Times dives into the whole TV/theatre divide*.  It's an old fight in the theatre world, but one that just keeps going. JZ seems to be fairly supportive, though, of the writers that light out for the coast and the "easy" money.

The successful young playwright who doesn’t take time off to work on a TV series is the exception. Cable networks like HBO, AMC and Showtime now provide a kind of second education for our best theater writers. And with the rise of ambitious series led by show runners with voices as distinctive as any film auteur, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

He talks to a number of playwrights, both in and out of the world of TV, most of whom have good things to say about the experience and how it relates to playwriting. That it has changed playwriting, how writers think about writing, though, is rarely explored.

The dozen or so playwrights that I talked to with TV experience generally shared this skepticism about a rigid distinction between art and commerce. They were more likely to talk about the creation of a play as a slow evolution rather than as a flash of inspiration.

This is a bit of a sticky wicket, isn't it? There's been a lot of lamenting about the shrinking scope of the new American play. Obviously, economics of all stripes plays into it. But the tighter integration of TV and film writing with playwriting training may have something to do with it. Since writing professionally is just about the only way for a a dramatist to, you know, eat, it's always in the back of a young writer's mind.

There's been a lot of complaining about The Walking Dead roundtable that we've been doing here. I think it's short-sighted and narrow-minded to dismiss just about anything on TV, to insist on this boundary between the high art of theatre and the low of television. Not only are we missing out on the important parts of the culture, we're also missing out on what dramatic writing is, how it works across mediums, how characters, story, and plot are built. Yep, it's a zombie show. But it's a smart, interesting zombie show.

Of course, there's a kind of flip side to it all. The Adam Rapp section of Zinoman's piece is fairly telling:

Adam Rapp said he derided such collaboration when he started as a playwright. “I used to think TV was just selling soap, and judged those who went to the West Coast for six figure salaries,” he said, adding that working on series like Showtime’s “L Word” and, currently, HBO’s “In Treatment” changed his mind. “In my early work I embellished too much. I would become overwrought. You can’t do that in TV. You learn to use subtext more.”

Huh. So...he thought all playwrights who wrote for TV were no talent hacks who sold out for buckets of cash...until he sold out for buckets of cash and then discovered the intergrity and utility of it. It's interesting that there are few playwrights interviewed who opted out, or found it stifling and unengaging. They must exist...or maybe they don't. Cash cures a lot of ills, don't it?

At the end of the day, Theresa Rebeck really nails it all, though:

But Ms. Rebeck finds snobbery toward television a waste of time, and no help to the theater either. “Going to TV doesn’t ruin your writing,” she said. “You know what ruins your writing? Not writing”

Writing is writing. Creating compelling stories is creating compelling stories. If writing for TV puts food on the table, and makes you a stronger writer, write about them zombies, folks. It isn't selling out, it's buying in. Or something like that.

*When I first posted this, I neglected to add a link. My bad.

The Walking Dead: Black Zombie, White Zombie

My contribution to this week's round-table is both late and lazy, but I did want to bring your attention to this wonderful article on sci-fi blog io9 that traces the evolution of the American zombie from its African, voodoo beginnings to the hungry-for-flesh undead version we know and love. It's interesting (and not to mention pertinent to this blog) to look at the zombie through the lens of race.

Read it here.

The History Boys (And Girls) (or Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral)

by 99 Seats

Remember a few months back, there was the whole "Where are the American political plays?" question. Could American playwrights write political plays? Would American audiences accept them? Why can't we be more like the British? Why can't a woman be more like a man? ...Sorry, that last one slipped out. Anyhoo.

I've been on one of those epic binges of plays, where, night after night, I'm staggering like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, from play house to play house, desperate for the next shot, still stinking from the last and it's never enough. I get angry, frustrated at the way we make plays, but actually seeing plays? So sweet. And good plays? Even sweeter. I've been lucky in the last couple of weeks and seen some damn good fare here in NYC. Damn good...and almost all of it has had a political angle. Most of it, actually, has been historical. Go figure.

In addition to the aforementioned The Scottsboro Boys, I've enjoyed both parts of Angels in America at the Signature, Eli Clark's Edgewise (co-produced by Page 73 Productions and The Play Company) and A Free Man of Color at Lincoln Center. So, yeah, that's a lot of theatre. And a lot of history and scope. I've been to antebellum New Orleans, 1980s New York, 1930s Jim Crow Alabama and a terrifying, terrifyingly amorphous near-future New Jersey. I've seen four  white writers grapple with the legacy of race in this country, the long shadow of slavery over us all. I've watched an almost-TV good-looking multicultural cast of kids play a kind of a game of bloody knuckles about loyalty, patriotism and cruelty in a fast-food restaurant. And I'm not even done. I got one more trip booked, to 1950s England on Friday for the Ensemble Studio Theatre's Photograph 51, to see how the discovery of DNA happened and who got left in the dust.

Sitting in the cavernous Vivian Beaumont last night, watching the incredible spectacle of A Free Man of Color (which I loved, loved, loved...and would have loved even more, if I wasn't still emotionally spent from The Scottsboro Boys), watching a master playwright play with space, time, history and fact like theyr were LEGO blocks, and largely keep the audience with him, I thought, Well, here's your political play. Here's your American political theatre. It is here, it is kicking and screaming and making itself known. As the play ran its course, building to a crescendo of a final line (for the record, it's the second best final line I've heard in a new play in the last year; nothing, but nothing, can top the ending of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, at least for me. A Free Man of Color's final line just edged out The Scottsboro Boys), I thought, This is what theatre is supposed to do. This is what I want theatre to do every night. You know, for all of my bitching and moaning and whinging, it is what theatre does fairly often. Sure, there's Driving Miss Daisy, but there are tonics. I haven't had a chance to catch Amy Herzog's After The Revolution yet, but I hear awesome things. And there's After The Wake at the Public, too. And, did you notice? I've mentioned plays by three women writers, with two women directors in the mix.

No, I'm not calling a truce or waving a white flag. Nor is this a victory dance. But watching a pretty great play, a play that asks its audience to keep up, to stay with it, and rewards them with wit, passion, challenging thoughts and ideas, and, yeah, okay, a dick joke or two, it can remind a hard-hearted cynic like me that we can be relevant, we can be fierce and brave and people will listen. It's an encouraging thought.

Angels in America is more than a decade old now. Watching the revival, I thought, Wow. Could this ever be produced again? Not just this particular play, but could a playwright have that kind of vision and passion, that imagination and see it fully realized on a stage? Can theatre have that kind of scope again? Can we dare our audience to see the things they would rather not? Then I saw A Free Man of Color (which is, of course, directed by George C. Wolfe, who directed Angels).

The words are a bit trite now, but, for me, they still have power: yes, we can.

The Walking Dead: Give Me Metaphor or Give Me (Un)Death

By Clay McLeod Chapman

     Katrina. That’s it. It was just the faintest trace in these last two episodes, “Guts” and “Tell It to the Frogs” – but there it was: the aroma of New Orleans after the flood. Bodies floating face-down in the water. The permeation of decay overtaking the air. The still waters suddenly becoming a breeding ground for bacteria, stagnant and impenetrable. Death; death is now everywhere.

     Entering into Atlanta has given The Walking Dead series creator Frank Daranbont the opportunity to utilize a visual vocabulary that harkens back to those images we all saw on the nightly news during Hurricane Katrina: Gutted buildings, littered streets, abandoned automobiles clotting up the highways. And bodies. An abundance of bodies left to fester.

     I’m not positive what this little personal epiphany does for me, but I think I’ve been yearning for a little more metaphor in The Walking Dead up until now. For better or for worse, whenever they shuffle onscreen, zombies these days always have to carry the weight of societal proselytizing on their slumping shoulders. They are the messengers of Deeper Meaning within the horror genre. It’s rare to watch zombies for the sake of zombies nowadays – so much so, that when we do (such as Flight of the Living Dead anybody?), it almost feels as if there’s something missing from the narrative. Not that we can’t – or that there aren’t plenty of recent zombie flicks that choose not to broadcast “symbolism! symbolism!” with their undead. I think I’ve just become accustomed to zombie films serving as parables to our modern world in the midst of utter chaos. Watch how society breaks down. Watch how humanity tries to rebuild. Watch how it’s not just zombies that we need to protect ourselves from, but from each other as well. And so on…

     Does every zombie film/series have to have some metaphor underneath its shriveling skin? Not really. Not at all. (Peter Jackson’s phenomenal Dead/Alive is a prime example.)

     Do I as one particular viewer favor a film that does?

     Yeah – I’d say so.

     Let’s look at the family tree of zombie films for a quick sec. The Walking Dead, for me, seems to fall most directly under the branch of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Romero has confessed that the correlation between his first film Night of the Living Dead and racial tensions in the late 60’s was totally incidental. By casting an African American as his lead Ben, Night suddenly took on a larger cultural context – even if by accident. Critics picked up on the visual similarities between the final haunting shots of Night and lynchings within the Deep South – and you better believe Romero sure was listening. When it was time to write and direct his second entry in his undead trilogy (forget the rest) nearly ten years later, Romero entered into Dawn of the Dead well-aware of the power his horde of rotten proselytizers had. His target this time around? Consumer culture. He put our shopping mall society into the cross-hairs and hit us dead-on. Bulls-eye.

     Dawn remains my personal fave of all of Romero’s films. Its message is blunt and barbed and it still holds up in my book. The further you go into the series, the more heavy-handed his metaphors tend to get – but it must be said: Dawn of the Dead laid down the template of zombie-as-metaphor for filmmakers to come.

     Zombies as terrorism (Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake).

     Zombies as illness (28 Days Later).

     Zombie as slaves (Fido).

     And look where we are now. Ever since 9/11, there has been an upsurge of zombie and vampires in pop culture. On the vampire front, you’ve got True Blood, the Twilight series, The Vampire Diaries, and so on. Romantic stuff. Girly stuff (I said it! I said it!) While on the zombie front, you’ve got: Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later, The Walking Dead – both its graphic novel and now its television series, BBC’s Deadset, Joe Dante’s entry into the Masters of Horror series Homecoming, and Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s Deadgirl, just to name a very, very small few…

     Why all the undead all of a sudden? Seems to be that we are a culture-in-crisis and the living dead, both fanged and festering, give us an opportunity to safely experience that fear-impulse that comes specifically from witnessing societal collapse. Terrorism roller coasters if you will. A Hurricane Katrina haunted house.

     As cynical as that sounds, I believe it. Is that anymore grotesque than the tour buses the shuttled people through New Orleans immediately after the hurricane? We want to experience the grim aftermath of a world gone to shot, but framed within the safety of a narrative – whether that narrative is coming from the boob-tube or a tour-guide. But there is a power to metaphor that shouldn't be shirked. I need metaphor to help me better understand what I'm watching/reading/listening to. Metaphor is the sugar coating the bitter pill. Time to swallow.

     Watching The Walking Dead, I feel like I have a metaphorical-template now: We are on our own here. We’ve got no running water anymore. No electricity. George Bush doesn’t care about us. We’re alone. We have to protect ourselves. We’ve got nothing; nobody. For those of us who have banded together – there are tensions, both racial and gendered-based, that we will have to push through in order to survive. Start over again.

     And the dead are a constant reminder of who-we-used-to-be, now gone. Gone for good.

     A slight digression: I’m actually writing this in a hotel room all the way down in Berea, Kentucky. I’ve been here all week, drowning in biscuits-and-gravy. To get here, I had to fly through Atlanta International Airport. The layover in Atlanta extended itself due to a technical malfunction on our plane. As I was sitting there in the airport, waiting for the call to board – it totally struck me: I’m in Atlanta. I’m in Atlanta. This is the first time in nearly ten years that I’d bitten into this Georgia peach – and in that time I’ve picked up Kirkman’s graphic novel, not to mention dive in head-first with the television series. Being here, surrounded by all these other travelers, in Atlanta, I couldn’t help but think back to last week’s episode and suddenly have myself a bit of a horror-bred panic attack. All I could do was play that game of imagining everyone around me suddenly turning into a zombie. What if I just-so-happened to be passing through Atlanta at the exact same time as the zombie apocalypse? Just my luck.

     Much like Kelly Link’s amazing short story “Some Zombie Contingency Plans,” I started mapping out my exit-strategies here in the airport. Could I make a stand here? Seal off all the exits and survive?

     Not a chance.

The Scottsboro Boys

by 99 Seats

In the comments here, commenter P. Thurmond asks:

First, suppose you got a commission (so lucrative you couldn't possibly turn it down) to write a play designed specifically to be shown to audiences who are primarily racists, the intention being to make them truly less racist. What would you write?

I didn't really know how to answer that question. Then I saw The Scottsboro Boys. I'm still recovering.

The Scottsboro Boys is that show. I haven't paid too close attention, but apparently there's some controversy about the show, about the fact that the entire creative team is white and about the use of blackface. I gotta say: I don't really get that. I mean, I do, but the show is so good, so powerful, so totally amazing, any issues with the creative team don't even matter.

Actually, they matter a lot. In the Driving Miss Daisy conversation, particularly with Jason Zinoman, much is made of how that play reflects the world as Alfred Uhry knew it, an honest recollection and representation. There's a suggestion that Uhry couldn't or shouldn't be expected to tell a wider story, to reach out and see the world through someone else's eyes. Well, Kander, Ebb and Thompson manage to, beautifully.

In a way, I think classic musical theatre people are particularly suited to explore the relationship between minstrel shows, vaudeville and musical theatre. Watching the actors tap dance routines about the electric chair, sing in perfect harmony about lynchings and finally appear in blackface to recount how lost to history they all were, the long umbilical cord from the Broadway stage to the antebellum South is in plain sight. They do honor and homage to the memories of those performers by telling the stories they couldn't tell.

See this show and you'll understand more about America, about black people, about people in general than you did before it started. Which is what we want from plays, right?

The Walking Dead Round-Table: Episode 3

By Isaac Butler

Well, after the mediocrity of Guts, we have Tell It To The Frogs which I'll say was by far the best written episode of the season thus far. Oddly enough, it also had the least to do with the comic. It focuses almost entirely on characters who never appear in the book (the Nazi Crankhead brothers, Black Guy, Black Lady, Latino Guy, Abusive Man and Abused Wife aren't in the comic book) and the characters who are in the series have important story details radically changed. The reveal that Shane told Lori that Rick was dead was awesome. It might be the best thing that's happened thus far. What a great twist on that relationship, and one that justifies and complicates the more expanded affair in this version of the story. 

The show also stayed true to what the comic does best: offering moments of ethical complexity along with ambiguity of character motives. So for example, we have Shane doing something we'd all like to do to abusive husbands, but we get the sense that he's actually doing it for the wrong reasons (to enact a catharsis of his own shame and rage at losing Lori).  Rick's rationale for going back to Atlanta rings entirely hollow. Oddly, I've read some sites complaining that his shifting rationales don't make sense. I think that's pretty obviously the point.  Rick has a certain love for Giant Brave Reckless Heroic Gestures, and going back to a city full of zombies to rescue someone no one likes is the king of all of them. It's rare in this kind of story to have the protagonist do something that clearly doesn't make sense and is both unjustifiable and unsympathetic. 

This was also the first episode in which anything good happened, and I'll tell you the truth, I was quite moved by the reunion of Rick, Lori and Carl.  It's also one of many moments where there's a lot going on, if one pays attention to the details.  True to the estrangement we come to learn a bit more about, Rick hugs Carl before Lori, who does not walk to him, but stands, petrified and crying, waiting for him to come to her.  It's an interesting moment, that tells you a lot about their relationship.

I think it's important to keep dwelling on the gender politics which Anne first raised and which 99 comments on here. I actually rolled my eyes at Lori's Malibu Stacy routine at the start of the episode.

It seems that what they're trying to play with here on the show is that after the apocalypse, this group of people has reverted to retrograde gender roles.  I think it's an interesting idea that they have handled very, very poorly, and as a result, they've woven some bad gender stuff into the DNA of the show from the get go.  We know from the misplaced anger at The Social Network that portraying and critiquing a misogynist world without seeming to perpetrate and revel in it is a very difficult needle to thread. I get the sense from this episode that that's what they were trying to do. 

They could've handled this better by (a) including a counter stereotypic character like Michonne (for those of you who've read the story) early on (or pushing Andrea in a more counter stereotypic direction) and/or (b) showing us this more traditionally gendered base camp earlier, and having people push up against it and be uncomfortable with it from the get go.

That's what I got.  Over to you, Clay and Josh!

Driving Miss Daisy Sucks. There. I Said It.

If you recall, a couple of weeks back, I had a bit of a back-and-forth with commenter P. Thurmond about this post and about Driving Miss Daisy in general. At the end, P. Thurmond, after talking about my shoddy, low-quality racial/political commentary, wrapped his/her comment up with:

You'd do better to point out the ways it falls short than to nebulously denounce its inability to do the impossible, but the quality of examination here has either fallen or I was too easy a few years ago.

So, confession time: I may have watched Driving Miss Daisy when I was a kid, maybe. But I had no memory of it whatsoever. I haven't seen the play. So, yeah, I was talking out my ass a little bit. Not good on my part, I know. So I decided to go back and watch it. Now I can speak more clearly and forcefully.

Driving Miss Daisy is a piece of crap.

I'm sorry, John Simon, but it is precisely "sentimental claptrap" that a lot of TV does a whole lot better. I can't say how much the play differs from the movie, but I don't imagine that it does too much. The movie, which I should remind you, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1989, an award that Do The Right Thing wasn't even nominated for, is fairly stagey and simple. It's mostly just Morgan Freeman driving around Jessica Tandy for thirty years or some crap.

About ten minutes into it, I knew I hated it. But I suffered through. For you, dear readers. I watched the whole thing (though, to be honest, I zoned out a couple of times there). So I can say, with authority, that not only is it fairly offensive, as a black person, but also a crap piece of drama. For reals, yo.

On the drama front, you DMD fans out there: what's the conflict? Who wants what from who? You let me know. Because it's mostly just a guy driving around an old lady, who's kind of mean to him, but not really all that mean and she just kind of stays mean, but then grows to like him or something. I'm sure I'm missing nuances in there, but that's all I got. Hoke is barely a character at all. He's a family-less, history-less blank slate, there to crank out some folky sayings and occasionally bust out some "dignity." In the film, he's the Magical Negro par excellence. He shows up out of nowhere, solves problems, doesn't have any clear wants or needs and that's it. At the end of the film, there's suddenly a mention of a family that he's apparently put through school. Who knew? Nobody, that's who.

I gotta say, it's just plain bad. And easy. And that brings us around to my political issues. Like we have a story set in the Jim Crow South, in Georgia, of all damn places, and there's basically no mention of that, really. It's freaking Georgia, people. And we've got Hoke, the Magical Negro, bowing and scraping and seemingly unfazed at all turns by a massive legal/social system built to oppress him. That's what makes it nearly a crime. They don't get to the civil rights movement until, I don't know, 1965 or something. It presents the civil rights movement not as something grown out of oppression and abuse but as something that parachuted down, brought by outsiders, that just happened.

This is a problem. Pop culture, literature, film, television, these are how our history is remembered, how the stories of our times are told. To leave out the fact that people just like Hoke boycotted, protested, sat at lunch counters, marched, fought and died for basic human rights tells a story that isn't true.

To Isaac's larger question about perspective and the value of varied critics' voices, to say that this story is "absolutely honest, truthfully aware of the rough and the smooth of life, beautifully (not just prettily) written about real people learning as they live, caught on the wing by an author who has something very human to say" leaves out about half the story. Seriously. The entire thing is about Miss Daisy learning to have respect for Hoke, just because he takes crap from her forever without complaining. She doesn't even care about the civil rights movement until it affects her life. And that happens in 1967, four years after one of the most notorious church bombings in history. But that one just killed black girls, so why would she care? We're supposed to like this woman. In the same way we're supposed to like her son Boolie, who says that while he's not a racist, he does business with racists and would rather keep doing that. Which is basically the whole "good men say nothing" problem. Does his mother call him out? Nope. Nobody does. It's totally reasonable to be an enabler for racists and prejudice.

I don't doubt that this play is true to Alfred Uhry's life experience and childhood. It feels like that. It feels like a play by someone who, as a child, watched ther interactions of adults and their servants and thought that's how they are, the subservient way that these servants act in front of me, that's how they are, all the time. I can tell you they weren't. And it does their memory and their descendents a disservice to say that this play speaks for them.

For other works of art, I can get past some issues, politcal or otherwise, because I like it. This wasn't one of them. Others can disagree. That's the whole point of perspectives. This is mine. And I'm not saying it's universal.