Wednesday, March 10, 2010

ah yes, theatre critics dig up more exciting "controversy"

Theater critics lead SUCH exciting lives! They are always discovering something fresh and new and cutting edge!

And even if, say, Ben Brantley gives the latest Martin McDonagh play a luke-warm review, the NYTimes feels obliged to send another critic, Jason Zinoman, out to make it all up to McDonagh by writing a standard fellatio piece.

What really annoys me is theater critics implying that if you don't find pointless violence to be the most wonderous thing ever, it means you're big wimp - or even, the worst thing you can be as far as theater critics are concerned - unmanly. A "pussy" even. Not somebody who has balls. Like a man does.

The idea that right-wingers can't get anything produced is insane - they are lining up to produce anything that Mamet sneezes onto paper and he's a total right-winger.

But uh-oh, the New Yorker's critic has accused McDonagh of racism so his days as critics' darling may be numbered. For while misogyny is encouraged - it shows you haven't been pussy-whipped by the PC patrol and are still manly and in possession of your testicles, racism is a crossing of the line in the US.

But oh those poor poor upper-class right-wing men - always being oppressed! That's why The Flea Theater thinks it's so bold and daring for producing a piece of anti-abortion dreck written by some old upper-class white man. FIGHT THE POWER!

And as much as the critics WANT to love GIRLS IN TROUBLE, to prove how "fair and balanced" they are, it is, by all accounts a huge reeking turd of a play. I could find only one review by a woman so far, Time Out New York's Diane Snyder (no surprise, the ranks of theater critics is totally dominated by males), and she says:

Surely Jonathan Reynolds is having us on. He purports to be politically conservative, but the character who delivers the antiabortion diatribe in his polemical play Girls in Trouble is so ridiculous that one suspects he’s secretly working for NARAL.
The McDonagh fellator, Jason Zinoman says:
Mr. Reynolds, a playwright ("Stonewall Jackson's House"), screenwriter and former food columnist for The New York Times Magazine, has written a raw, flawed work. But he also goes places intellectually and dramatically that no left-wing dramatist would dare. At times that’s thrilling.

Few left-wing dramatists would write something as simplistic and noxious as what Reynolds wrote and still get produced. But thank Our Lord Jesus H. Christ that The Flea is brave enough to stand up for the rights of wealthy old right-wing white men, who have nothing but Fox News, obscenely wealthy think-tanks, the Catholic Church and 24-7 talk radio to turn to in order to get their views across! They MUST have theater too!

I will give Zinoman one thing - he's one of the few critics who gets how crazy right-wing OLEANNA is:
The deck is clearly stacked — it makes “Oleanna” look fair and balanced...