Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in williamhenry's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, March 29th, 2009
11:40 am	Rose and the Rime (House Theatre of Chicago at the Chopin Theatre) A lot of people take issue with House Theatre, and this play legitimizes a lot of their complaints. I have liked many of their shows in the past, shows in which the energetic stagecraft is backed up with an intelligent, coherent story. But this one falls well short. The stagecraft is there. Wonderful, creative, low-tech effects abound – snowstorms, shrieking hawks darting overhead, a haunted forest, a girl crossing a chasm on a series of ropes. But the plot is so thin and formless. “This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” Halfway through, I genuinely thought the play was ending, and when it didn’t, it just felt like extra material was simply spooling out in a sloppy pile. The story is one of those tales in which the ending puts us right back at the beginning, with the implication that everything is going to repeat itself, possibly ad infinitum. But a good twist ending has to feel as inevitable as it is surprising. The plot did not have the structure to make the ending satisfying. In fact, the production has so little faith in its own ability to tell the story that the dialogue is peppered with big expositional declarations like “Don’t you see? The magic coin gives them happiness they don’t deserve!” and “This has all happened before!” These are moments that plot, action, character development, dialogue, and – yes – stagecraft should be able to get across without such overt declarations. The charming, likable, energetic young cast is still present, but I found it hard to follow them on a journey that I just didn’t find all that enticing. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 6th, 2009
10:47 am	The Lost Shakespeare Play (EP Theater) Full disclosure: I wrote this play. I’m still very impressed and happy with it. I saw nine of the ten performances, and as the playwright, I feel like I’m feeding the script through my brain over and over with each viewing. I keep finding things that ring false, scenes that outstay their welcome, lines that are unclear. When laugh lines don’t get laughs, it cripples me inside. When they do, there’s a rush of satisfaction, but it’s brief, because it gets cleared away to make room for the next laugh line that may or may not get a laugh. All told, the houses were more responsive than not, with several just fantastic performances. The last two, on March 21 and 22, were probably the best – cast and house in perfect harmony, and a lot of genuinely thrilled audience members. I couldn’t be happier with the cast, crew, and direction. And I’m in a good place to improve the play. Now I just have to get my ass in gear and improve it. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 6th, 2009
4:04 pm	Macbeth (Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier) It’s probably a bad sign when you’re watching a production of Macbeth, and Macbeth himself enters the stage, and you think to yourself, “Oh yeah. That guy is Macbeth.” Over all, this was not a memorable production. It’s a “modern” take, full of hints at how the media treats war and heroes. But this approach offers two unfortunate side effects. First, the camouflage. This might be partly why I lost track of who Macbeth was. Second, the video projection. There’s just no way to do it without making it look cheap and cheesy. The witches doubled as journalists, so their videotaping of press conferences would be broadcast live above the stage. I suppose this made the characters “larger than life” and “public figures,” but the limitations of the medium hamstring the effect. (One exception: Lady Macbeth has some sort of nightmare sequence – one that foreshadows “out damned spot” – and a scene of bloody slaughter is projected across her robes. This would have been a more chilling effect in a play that had no other examples of video projection.) Generally, this isn’t a play that will resonate if it’s dull, or if you’re spending too much time sitting in the dark, questioning its director’s choices. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
2:29 pm	Touch (New Leaf Theatre) An incredibly frustrating experience. Dan Granata does a brilliant job in the lead role, and the rest of the cast is admirable as well, but at heart, this is a very flawed play. Vast stretches of it are told in monologue form, for no real reason I can figure out. Characters take turns narrating their own actions, and the actors do an admirable job of it. But the net result can keep people outside, with a sense that they’re not watching the story unfold so much as having it explained to them. And we need emotional involvement in a play like this. Granata plays an astronomer whose wife vanishes one night, tearing a hole in his life. He’s very believable as a man drifting through the cosmos of his own grief. But as our orbit gets farther from him, we run into some problems. His best friend is fairly believable as he battles with jealousy and love for the astronomer. But he falls into a love affair with the missing wife’s sister, a mutual infatuation that seems to spring up from nowhere and takes root after he makes what in real life would be a pretty insensitive joke. (He wryly points out how loud and angry she got in the police station during a botched investigation of her still-missing sister. Instead of being horrified, she is charmed.) As for the sister, she is an English teacher who expresses her love of words by declaring, “I love words.” She then proceeds to use and dissect a lot of them. It feels like a declaration from the playwright more than an organic piece of character development. And rounding out the cast is a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. The character does not do much to be lifted out of that cliché. She becomes kind of a chaste way for the astronomer to deal with – and/or indulge in – the loss of his wife. But she ends up functioning largely as a more subdued variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The production has great performances. It’s directed and designed beautifully – the lighting and set are transcendent. But the script banks on a lot of emotion that it just doesn’t earn. (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
1:36 pm	Kerpatty (Sketchfest at Theatre Building Chicago) Erin Pallesen and Pat Dwyer are two very exuberant and funny twentysomethings who put their boundless energy into one blackout sketch after another, creating an anything-goes atmosphere. Most sketches are very funny, some are transcendent, and even the mediocre ones are able to soar by on lots of friendly goodwill. Not only do you think these guys are funny, but you actively root for them. And the show was so brief and packed that I would happily have sat for something twice as long. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
2:29 pm	Don’t Dress for Dinner (Royal George Theatre) I love farce. But I see why a lot of people recoil from it. This production exemplifies a lot of their complaints. The plot of Don’t Dress for Dinner is your standard series of mistaken identities and sexual infidelities. But I feel that they are handled with way too heavy a touch to be rewarding. I’m not sure if it’s the fault of the script, the direction, or the performances – I suspect all three – but each insult, twist, and bit of stage business hits with a plodding thud. There are two things that inch this play toward something of higher quality than it actually is. One is the nearly meta-theatrical presence of an out-of-town guest character who seems to be on the verge of awareness that he’s in a farce. He’s the only character who is in on every single strand of philandering and misrepresentation from the beginning. As a result, he has to keep meticulous track of what lie has been told to whom, and how to reconcile all of the lies when the people he’s been lying to are in the same room with each other. Unfortunately, Jeffrey Donovan, the TV actor who plays the role, doesn’t quite have a handle on how to make this the dizzying tour de force it could be. At the end, when he unspools several consecutive monologues that justify all the contradictions to a roomful of bewildered friends and lovers, he just rushes through them without really seeming to register what he’s saying. We should be impressed that his character has the wherewithal to spin all these lies and justifications off the cuff. Instead, we’re just impressed that Jeffrey Donovan has memorized all those lines. The second positive attribute this play has is the performance of Spencer Kayden in the role of a hired cook who – for a price – plays along with all the lying and takes on every ridiculous persona the protagonists thrust upon her. Seriously, it’s like Kayden is in a different, much better play. She handles all the outlandishness without getting distractingly cartoony and without playing so hard to the wackiness of the situation. Her dry, unwavering delivery is an island of instinct and genuine humor in a sea of tiresome forced whimsy. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
4:59 pm	August: Osage County (The Music Box, New York) A magnificent, sprawling work, every bit as engrossing and exhausting as promised. That said, I’m not sure every single person in the play had to have some giant horrifying secret revealed over the course of it. This lent the show a bit of a soap opera/potboiler quality. However, that quality was so blatant that I started asking myself if it was deliberate, and if so, why... One of the major themes was the difference between WASP-American culture and Native American culture – more specifically, the pushing of Native American culture to the background while WASPish melodrama took center stage. Maybe what we have is form following function – once the passions of this overeducated Midwestern family burn themselves out, and the drug-addicted matriarch sits abandoned in her giant house on the windswept prairies, then we see the real America, in the person of the Native American housekeeper, remain there, silently, implacably, waiting to retake possession of the land. The white people are a nomadic, diasporic group, a temporary bedevilment, that will pass eventually. Now, I wonder if that’s kind of an over-romanticized, “noble savage” take on the Red Man. But I suppose it’s not for me to say. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
1:24 pm	Six Years (New Leaf Theatre) I am writing this review four months after seeing the play, so I have only a vague recollection of the production being very good. We check in with a married couple every six years, starting from the husband’s battle-fatigued return from WWII. I remember great performances all around, and very effective aging from all the characters involved. Script-wise, there may have been a bit of heavy-handedness in making sure we knew that six years had passed from one scene to the next, but I may be misremembering, and that heavy-handedness may in fact have been necessary to make sure of clarity. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 17th, 2008
2:08 pm	R.U.R. (Strawdog Theatre Company) This play provided us with the term “robot,” though it’s really much closer to a zombie story. It’s all here – a scourge arising from some kind of biological experiment gone wrong, a band of survivors holed up in a fortress, a gang of unfeeling, murderous non-humans waiting them out with infinite patience. The play is very old fashioned. The dialog and conventions are stilted by today’s standards, and the Garden of Eden ending is a little heavy-handed. But it’s to Strawdog’s credit that they play it straight, and with quite a bit of effectiveness. The robots are all played by the most eerily good-looking actors, and their emotionless patience really opens up the uncanny valley. When the end of the play rolls around, I can’t figure out why the only human survivor is so keen on getting a robo-topia started, or why the robots’ sudden discovery of romantic love logically implies the (previously absent) ability to reproduce biologically. But it’s a fascinating fable about man overstepping nature, made even more fascinating by the fact that it dates from the 1920s. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 10th, 2008
2:07 pm	Amadeus (Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier) This was a very solid production, with a few minor quibbles about the two leads. Mozart generally was quite good, but sometimes his enfant terrible act was too much of an act. For instance, when he arrived to hear the Emperor plodding his way through Salieri’s march, Mozart began skipping around the room with a mock-serious look on his face. It reeked of a self-aware episode of “playing to the audience” to get a laugh (which it didn’t succeed in doing). And it took focus away from my favorite sequence in the play. Salieri was also quite good, a craven, obsessive man. But my problem with him was that I never believed him when he talked of how wonderful Mozart’s music was. He was able to get genuinely passionate about his frustrations and his anger at God. But when it came to his responses to his rival’s music, time and time again, he was very casual, like he was simply reciting a monologue. Over all, though, this was a very worthwhile production, and as usual I have some pissy little complaints to make. It’s nice to see a performance of a play that reminds you of why you love the play so much. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
4:52 pm	Candide (Porchlight at Theatre Building Chicago) A very frustrating production, with great voices undermined by lousy direction. Instead of letting the humor of the piece speak for itself, the director felt the need to shove in all sorts of “jokes” so people would know it was funny. Sometimes they were anachronisms, such as the appearance of 900 North Michigan shopping bags in the “Glitter and Be Gay” sequence. Sometimes they were lame “meta” gags, like the faux-mischievous interaction from the members of the orchestra. As a result of this overall philosophy, the singers often seemed more concerned with funny facial expressions and blocking than they were with making their lyrics heard clearly. It’s like the production was so worried about being funny that it covered all the actual humor written into the piece with an avalanche of business. I know this show has gone through countless revisions and versions, so I don’t know if this script was the most recent “official” version or some new cutting or what. But something occurred to me while watching this production. It didn’t earn its ending. We’ve just sat through an epic story of misery and murder, rape and earthquakes, intolerance and cruelty. It’s all handled with black humor, spread thick with cynicism, in which the only person who expects any higher meaning in life is a good-natured dimwit. And then all of a sudden, with no warning, we’re listening to “Make Our Garden Grow,” this golden, earnest anthem to banding together to make the best of life in a cruel world. When the horrors are treated so glibly, how are we supposed to be moved by this revelation? It may be the cutting. This production was only about 90 minutes long, with no intermission, and I’m fairly certain it’s the shortest Candide I’ve ever seen. So maybe the powers that be over at Porchlight were so concerned with streamlining that they didn’t realize they were losing the emotional journey. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
10:32 am	Ten Cent Night (Chicago Dramatists) This dark comedy by Marisa Wegrzyn is just missing something for me. The writing itself is sharp and woven through with the kind of wit that’s easily recognizable from the playwright’s blog. And I say that for better or for worse; too often the witty lines feel less like dialogue and more like a playwright pushing the “insert witty line” button. And that might be part of what kept me at arm’s length, but for the most part, the dialogue was engaging. No, I think the problem is the contrivances Wegrzyn uses. Why does Roby drag a folding chair around with her, despite being no longer handcuffed to it? The technical answer is, “To carry a useful symbol/running gag into the rest of the play.” Why does a money-runner being hunted down by a murderous criminal stick around and have sex in the same house where the murderous criminal hunting him down is also sticking around and having sex? The technical answer is, “To keep everyone together in the same scene and set.” Why is everyone in the family so cavalier and casual about the very recent suicide of the patriarch? The technical answer is… I’m not sure. Maybe “To create a quirky, darkly comic atmosphere.” But there’s no human reason for the characters to do any of these things. And I found it distracting. I asked myself if I was getting hung up on these questions unfairly. Maybe I need to put aside my left-brain’s objections and just enjoy the story and its absurdities. But I do think that some of that responsibility lies with the writer. I found myself wondering if Wegrzyn is Sarah-Ruhl-lite. Ruhl has a lot of absurd things happen in her work, but she somehow creates an atmosphere where the nonsense makes sense. In Ten Cent Night, I got a lot of head-scratching moments without the sense that the playwright is laying the groundwork for me to appreciate them. That affected my appreciation of the story. With so much contrivance to reconcile myself with, I found it hard to buy the emotional bonds being formed and broken. I should have felt some swell of emotion when a mute mustered up the ability to speak the name of a woman he’s fallen in love with. (The woman in question burst into tears.) But I was too busy wondering if these two people who have barely met (including a woman so emotionally stunted that she is unaffected by her father’s suicide and has let a high school crush destroy her ability to engage in healthy relationships) could possibly be that miraculously in love with each other. Should I be worried about myself that my attention perked up when the fraternal twins started necking? Their agonizing yearning for each other was the most affecting relationship in the show. I felt for them. In any case, the performances were great all around. The set, a rotating construction of functioning backdrops and walls, was pretty brilliant. I just kept wanting to get swept up in the goings-on, but nothing ever quite caught. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 12th, 2008
9:29 am	The Glass Menagerie (Shattered Globe at The Greenhouse Theater) There may be something wrong with me. I think I have fallen in love with Laura in both Glass Menagerie productions I have seen. I suppose she is supposed to be radiant in her awkwardness and her goodheartedness. Especially since we are seeing her through the eyes of a man who is torturing himself for abandoning her. We the audience have to love her, or a linchpin is removed. So, I don’t think I have some sort of limping fetish. Allison Batty, the actress playing Laura in this case, took a while to grow on me. I think I found her performance a little too mannered at the beginning. But once that Gentleman Caller scene arrives, even when you know what’s going to happen, and how painful it will be, you can’t not root for her. My friend David Dastmalchian is fantastic as Tom. Mike Falevits is an affable lunkhead as the Gentleman Caller. Linda Reiter as Amanda lost her way on the lines a bit early on, which I found a little distracting, but once she settled in, she was heartbreaking and magnetic. As for the stagecraft, I wasn’t a huge fan of the projected video upstage, and sometimes the ambient street noise was distractingly repetitive in its loop. But he set was sparse and fluidly functional, and the lighting was gorgeous. Overall, a very worthwhile production, tight and emotionally affecting. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
6:01 pm	The Cross and the Switchblade (Neo-Futurarium) Another entry from the Neo-Futurists’ B-movie summer festival. This 1970 movie followed a preacher, played by Pat Boone, as he strode confidently into the mean streets of New York City to quell gang violence through the power of Christianity. It seems like a horribly contrived idea, and if this live performance gave the slightest indication, it was. There’s a tightrope in every one of the It Came From the Neo-Futurarium performances I have ever seen. How do you play up how ridiculous the movie is without going overboard in ridiculing it? If you go too far, you become tiresome in your snark, and you overshadow what makes the movie, for all its horribleness, entertaining. If you hold back too much… Well, to be honest, that has never been a problem. The performances were hilarious all around, but the narration spent too much effort in its commentary. We in the audience know this is a bad movie. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be performing it. Besides, we’re right here. We can hear the awful dialogue and imagine the horrible set pieces. You don’t have to work so hard to let us know that you’re in on the joke. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
3:11 pm	The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Gift Theatre at Victory Gardens) A huge, sprawling epic, part education in Biblical history, part examination of what exactly God could possibly be up to. Excellent cast, and a script that plucks what it needs from pop culture and archetypal characters. There is a lot of fascinating stuff here, certainly more than I could take in with a single viewing. And it was all incredibly intelligent, alternating funny with touching, and filled with pockets of rich research that never felt like a lecture. The script has the usual types of logic problems that come with a huge, sprawling, intellectual/philosophical “concept show.” For example, the lawyers defending and prosecuting Judas are very passionate about their respective sides of the case, but I don’t think we’re ever quite shown why. The defending attorney isn’t sure she believes in God (despite her very presence in the play fairly bursting with cold, hard evidence of Him). The prosecution has no legitimate license to practice and seems too full of shallow flattery to care as deeply and doggedly as he does. But once you acknowledge that the spirit of the play is more important than the lower-level logic that brings it to you, you are rewarded with an entertaining and lively discussion on faith versus proof, free will versus faith, sin versus forgiveness, and power versus powerlessness. A worthwhile venture that I’d like to see again, eventually. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
2:31 pm	The Belle’s Stratagem (Halcyon Theatre at the Peter Jones Gallery) This 18th century play was given a slimmed-down, modern-day production. The cast was largely great, and the material was sparkling and witty, but today it seems very slight. Schemes are hatched and then abandoned without (in my opinion) being fully explored, and by this point in the history of drama, we pretty much know how it’s all going to shake out. I’m inspired to ask myself why a play by Shakespeare still strikes me as good, while something from a couple hundred years later seems a little tired. I don’t know. Am I just overly susceptible to the mystique and the company line on Shakespeare? Had Shakespeare written this very play (and you could argue that he did), would I be more willing to analyze it and praise its poetry? (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
1:39 pm	4Play (Theatre Building Chicago) A frustratingly badly written quartet of one-acts by Michael Bassett. Each play had its own individual set of problems, but there were two overarching flaws that were common to all four. First, conversations and revelations were artificially delayed and drawn out. Obviously, there is an art to planting a seed and then delaying the bloom. That keeps people interested. But if it’s done in a frustrating or unnatural manner, and if you can see the playwright’s hamfisted hand in the delay, it just gets tiresome. The clearest example was in the final one-act. A bride is asking (and asking and asking) why her groom is late for the wedding and hiding out in their apartment with a bullet hole in his side. The groom hems and haws until the bride, who has already performed acts of violence on him in the scene, threatens to shove her finger into his bullet hole if he doesn’t start explaining, and quick. The groom answers, “Do you remember that night five years ago under the stars, when I first fell in love with you?” ?!?! The correct answer would have been, “I tried to rob a pet store so we’d start off our marriage with some money.” And if the answer takes any longer than that, the playwright better have a damn good reason. But the groom delays this in kind of a flowery monologue that I imagine is there to melt the bride’s heart in the process of his confession. But it’s all so fake and arbitrary it just pounds you with frustration and boredom. The second problem is that all four scripts had, for lack of a better term, twist endings. But none of the twists was earned. The clearest example of this was in the second piece, in which a kinky couple invites someone over who they met on the internet, ostensibly for a threesome. There’s a lot of drawn out business, some of it funny and some of it less so. And the scene ends with the wife pulling out a knife to stab the visitor to death. Blackout. Problem is, there’s nothing in the scene that precedes that moment that makes the knife a legitimate part of the play. Or if there is, it sure slipped past me. There’s no foreshadowing, there’s no sense that this knife was the final piece of a puzzle that was being pieced together, there’s no thematic reason for this wacky scene about a self-conscious, sexually curious couple to end with a shocking murder. You could end any play with one of the characters pulling out a knife, and sure, it would be a surprise ending. (Except for something like Blood Wedding, I suppose, where there actually is a knife drawn at the end.) But if there’s nothing leading up to the surprise, what’s the point? It wasn’t all horrible. There were some decent moments. (The husband of the kinky couple, dressed as a cowgirl for the role-playing game, at one point finds himself taking on the phone to his mother and his young daughter. It was a genuinely funny moment that slid into place organically, and it was one of the few bright spots in the writing.) And the cast was good, generally much better than the material. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 6th, 2008
1:38 pm	The Comedy of Errors (Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier) This was a meta-telling of Shakespeare’s play, imagining it as being made into a movie in the 1940s to entertain the troops during World War II. It was a lot better than it might have been. In the wrong hands, this could have been filled with lame, campy “bits” and mountains of pretentious self-infatuation. But the framing device was a well-written and funny comedy in its own right. It didn’t feel tacked on, and it got its legitimate due without relying too heavily on Shakespeare’s play to do all the heavy lifting. This was really a new play that happened to have a Comedy of Errors contained inside it, truncated but surprisingly complete and clear. Performers, directors, and crewmembers interact, egos are tossed around, relationships start up and end – all the ingredients of a backstage farce are here, but put forth in a respectful and restrained manner that gives it more weight. This is how you do a framing device without harming the play it frames (Court Theatre’s Titus Andronicus, I’m looking in your direction). (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
1:36 pm	Beggars in the House of Plenty (Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company at Angel Island) This is an autobiographical memory play by John Patrick Shanley, and for my money, the first act is the best. It observes a family through the eyes of a child, and a child’s understanding of life and relationships, and causes and effects, suffuses the events in a funny and sometimes frightening manner. Subsequent acts falter by becoming a little too esoteric, and by succumbing a little too much to the Plight of the Genius Child story arc. The metaphors seemed a little too private, and I gave up on them, eventually, I was scared that the play was going to end with the main character, Shanley’s stand-in, taking out a pad of paper and scrawling, “And that’s when I knew my purpose in this life was to write.” Thankfully, he did not. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
7:41 pm	Fatboy (A Red Orchid Theatre) The first act of this play is just as wonderful and disgusting as I’d heard. Playwright John Clancy constructs vast, ornate architecture of obscenity in introducing us to the shameless, unselfconscious appetites of two loathsomely obese wretches. Poetry and scatology intersect, and the performers (Steve Pickering and Jennifer Engstrom) go balls-out in delivering them to us, portraying a huge, vulgar couple that resorts to violence to grab money and food from anyone who gets in their way. It’s hilarious and invigorating, and it leaves us eagerly anticipating how they’re going to top it in subsequent scenes. Unfortunately, we are then subjected to an interminable second act, wherein Fatboy is on trial for his first-act crimes against humanity. It’s filled with lame courtroom jokes (including, so help me, a running “order in the court” gag), unfunny side characters (one character asks for permission to leave the courtroom because he’s – tee hee! – double-cast and needs to change into his next costume), and a complete failure to build on anything that came before it. There’s a song that’s somewhat amusing, but it’s really just the same swearing that we’ve been hearing all along, with its novelty briefly revived by being set to verse. The climax of the second act gives us Fatboy, in blood-smeared suit and stars-and-stripes necktie, delivering a furious and insatiable monologue that builds to a medley of Presidential quotes, paraphrased and parodied to include references to gluttony, murder, and profanity. Okay, okay: we got it. Fatboy is America. The murder and rape victims are Its Underprivileged Citizens and The Rest of the World. We’re with ya. Now what? Well, now we move on the act three, which is a step up from the second. Fatboy has grown weary of the bowing and scraping of his subordinates, and even worse, he realizes that he has literally eaten all the food in the world. He contemplates his legacy and survives a few assassination attempts, and then... Well, then Steve Pickering drops character, trou, and F-bombs. He shrugs off his fat suit and looks directly at us, the audience (the house lights have come up), and chastises us for... Well, I guess for sitting here watching a play when we should be out changing the world for the better. We’re all a bunch of sheep (yes, he literally calls us “sheep”) who, Clancy seems to assume, have mistaken the play’s ham-fisted satire for purely silly fiction. Acres of sarcasm are chopped down and burned to fuel this tirade about what we shouldn’t do (trust the corrupt government, stay sequestered from our neighbors, consume mindlessly). But there’s never any advice as to what we should do. I figure as long as you’re beating us over the head, you may as well take full advantage of the soapbox to share some of your answers with us. Instead, Pickering exits through the house and slams the door. Blackout. This struck me as monumentally lazy playwriting. If you’re willing to drop the play and lambaste the audience, shouting your message at them, why write the play at all? Why not just start out with the “you are all a bunch of complacent morons” monologue, and we’d be done 90 minutes earlier? But worse, I don’t know who Clancy expects to reach with his message. Chances are that people willing to show up to a small, profanity-laden stage play are not going to be people who inherently trust George W. Bush to do what’s right in the world. So the audience that 1) needs to hear this sentiment, and 2) arrives at this production to hear it, is largely theoretical. The result is a kind of circle-jerk. But even all that might have been somewhat moving if Pickering had stayed outside, the remaining cast members had exited the stage, and we the audience had been left in silence to contemplate the tongue-lashing we’d just received. Instead, we got the standard-issue smiley curtain call and the resumption of the jaunty ragtime house music. The whole evening just seemed so pleased with itself. It wasn’t George W. Bush-level smug, and it certainly was harmless compared to the current administration. But a person who creates facile caricatures of his enemies is pretty much doomed to misunderestimate them. (Comment on this)