- Charles McNulty (sort of) longs for the well-made play.
- Claudia La Rocco's otherwise sharp takedown of Rebeck's Seminar strikes me as a case of the all-too-familiar p.i.e. (portraying is endorsing) fallacy.
- Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space doesn't work, it's true, but it's hardly a symptomatic case of all that's wrong with contemporary playwriting, and it's not even the town's preeminent bad Ruhl imitation (that would be The Mountaintop).
- For what it's worth, Scott Walters' latest modest proposal literally ruined my sleep over the holidays.
Re: Claudia's piece on Seminar. Agreed. Of course, I'm on record as having loved the play as a well-oiled entertainment. I didn't interrogate the material's sexual politics, which means I didn't get them or I endorse them, I guess.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that Claudia, who normally reviews more experimental, interdisciplinary work for the Times, should hold a new mainstream play up to such standards of social-ethics role-modeling. It's a satirical comedy, not a position paper on feminism. Characters might say sexist or piggish things; does that make the play sexist? The men are not glorified; they are just as flawed as the women.
Lastly, I wonder if Claudia holds all the work she reviews up to this moral yardstick. When a performance artist such as Ann Liv Young penetrates a fellow performer with a dildo and then shrieks a song into a microphone between cascades of obscenities, is that a negative representation of women? Or, being so grotesque and extreme, does it negate/supply its own critique, thus making it relieving the critic of the need to make moral judgments?
Good God! Why did it ruin your sleep???
ReplyDeleteScott: It provoked me, as intended, and I spent something like half of one night lying awake, brooding about a response. But none of my midnight thoughts cohered in the cold light of the next day, which in any case was soon overtaken by Legos. The throwdown will have to wait.
ReplyDeleteLegos are more important.
ReplyDelete