I don’t know what’s worse about the review of this play — the play itself (yet another rub-humanity’s-nose-in-shit funfest featuring vile characters doing vile things to each other because, ummm…. war is hell or something original and groundbreaking like that), or the reviewer’s glowing assessment, which doesn’t miss a single cliché from the Nu Theater Reviewer Book of (Non) Style: the actors are “brave” for taking off their clothes and simulating all sorts of sex acts, the play “shocks” because its “horrors are created by characters who are not, finally, so unlike us,” life is dull so therefore people are somehow justified in doing horrible things to each other, early audiences for the play were “Victorian” in their reaction (in other words, they reacted like I am doing now) and so on. The reviewer’s own style is sub-par Rex Reed, or like that person who wrote movie reviews for Cosmopolitan back in the Eighties who loved every. Single. Film. That he saw. Even those Benji movies.
It’s things like this that make me glad I’m a middle-class, ordinary clod whose response to “the dull cloth of the everyday” is to want art to be beautiful and uplifting. How bourgeois! One good thing, though: the author of this piece of trash committed suicide a few years ago, so at least she won’t be writing any more of her “astounding dramas.”
(Via a commenter on Ace of Spades, who unfortunately attended a performance of this beauty.)
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