January 19, 2023
“The Rink” at Southwark Playhouse: Excellent Production Gives New Life to Kander & Ebb Showby Randi / June 14, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “My Name is Lucy Barton” at the Bridge Theatre in London, playing until June 23.
The best one-man shows are those that make you forget that only one person is up on that stage. It takes an enormous talent to fill a theatre so completely that you feel the force of a whole company entertaining you with their stories. The last time (maybe only other time?) I felt like a stage was filled with several great entertainers instead of just one was in Michael Urie’s brilliant one-man show Buyer and Cellar. Now the wonderful Laura Linney manages to achieve a similar result in The Bridge Theatre’s “My Name is Lucy Barton”, in which she tells her story so vividly and describes other people so keenly that it feels as effective as a play with a big ensemble. She distracts you from how hard she’s working up there with how realistic her storytelling is. Directed by Richard Eyre, this moving tale of one woman’s struggles to come to terms with her past while recognizing her internal pain is at times funny, depressing, and surprisingly universal in its representation of the humanity of loneliness.
The best one-man shows are those that make you forget that only one person is up on that stage. It takes an enormous talent to fill a theatre so completely that you feel the force of a whole company entertaining you with their stories. The last time (maybe only other time?) I felt like a stage was filled with several great entertainers instead of just one was in Michael Urie’s brilliant one-man show Buyer and Cellar. Now the wonderful Laura Linney manages to achieve a similar result in The Bridge Theatre’s “My Name is Lucy Barton”, in which she tells her story so vividly and describes other people so keenly that it feels as effective as a play with a big ensemble. She distracts you from how hard she’s working up there with how realistic her storytelling is. Directed by Richard Eyre, this moving tale of one woman’s struggles to come to terms with her past while recognizing her internal pain is at times funny, depressing, and surprisingly universal in its representation of the humanity of loneliness.
In what’s pretty much a 90-minute monologue that at times will make you think holy hell how does anyone memorize a thing like this and also isn’t she so thirsty I’m almost done my water and I’m just sitting here, Linney plays Lucy Barton, the character from Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 (damn they worked fast) novel of the same name, adapted for this stage by Rona Munro. Although it’s a work of fiction, the character of Lucy is so fleshed out and so genuine that it seems like a true story. With the lights up, Lucy in her NYC-hospital-chic ensemble tells the audience that she was once in the hospital for nine weeks, away from her husband and her two daughters for all that time. During her hospital stay, her mother surprised her with a visit. The lights go down as she returns to that hospital room to tell us what happened during that reunion with her mother, and what informed their relationship from their difficult past.
At first, I’m watching Linney say interesting words about how sick she was (if I recall correctly, they never really say what the issue was) and how her relationship with her mother was rough to say the least, but after about 10 or so minutes, Linney became Lucy Barton, and although I was still staring at Linney’s amazing face dimples (definitely one of my top five favorite face dimples), I was watching Lucy tell her story. She told her story of her hospital stay while interweaving details from her past, her terribly rough childhood out in the sticks of Illinois with her father, who had PTSD from the war, her cold mother, her siblings who it seems she never bonded with, and all the abuse she suffered, even as a young child who couldn’t understand why she was being punished. Her storytelling is peppered with thoughts about how hard it was to be so lonely in that hospital room, and then her loneliness becomes the driving theme of her entire existence, developed in her pitiful childhood.
At first, I’m watching Linney say interesting words about how sick she was (if I recall correctly, they never really say what the issue was) and how her relationship with her mother was rough to say the least, but after about 10 or so minutes, Linney became Lucy Barton, and although I was still staring at Linney’s amazing face dimples (definitely one of my top five favorite face dimples), I was watching Lucy tell her story. She told her story of her hospital stay while interweaving details from her past, her terribly rough childhood out in the sticks of Illinois with her father, who had PTSD from the war, her cold mother, her siblings who it seems she never bonded with, and all the abuse she suffered, even as a young child who couldn’t understand why she was being punished. Her storytelling is peppered with thoughts about how hard it was to be so lonely in that hospital room, and then her loneliness becomes the driving theme of her entire existence, developed in her pitiful childhood.
Honestly, I just read Orphan Train this week and I’m getting the horrible childhood details from that book confused with Lucy’s, that’s how bad it was. We learn that as a young girl her parents would lock her in her dad’s truck sometimes at night, and she would scream for them to let her out. Even when a snake was in there with her, they wouldn’t listen to her screams. With that kind of detail, you can’t help but despise her mother and understand how big a deal it was that she visited her sick daughter, coming all the way to New York City when she is scared of traveling, and how anxious Lucy was about it even though a large part of her was happy to have the comfort of family. I mean it’s the least she could do. Linney’s, or Lucy’s, imitations of the mother were superb, with that thick Chicago-area accent and the too accurate recounting of how gossipy she is. I don’t remember the mother’s name but I remember her tales of her frenemy Cathy Neely, because of how often the mother talked about this woman, spitting out her name with pure venom and those exaggerated mid-West vowels. I LOVED how at one point in Lucy’s mother’s chitchat including a tidbit about a girl Mary who got married and the vowel she used for Mary and marry was the same, which is such a precise dialect detail that I almost stood up and shouted GIVE HER AND HER VOCAL COACH ALL THE AWARDS. I’m kind of obsessed with the Mary/merry/marry dialectical test because as a Philadelphian we are among the few, we happy few, who pronounce all three distinctly. Anyway.
Linney is pitch-perfect as she unfolds the truth behind why Lucy’s relationship with her mother is so strained, and why her loneliness feels like the main disease she’s suffering from, more debilitating and hopeless than whatever has been keeping her in the hospital for months. It’s such a full-bodied recounting that it feels like all the characters she mentions are up there with her, shoring up her tale. I was especially struck by the idea of her neighbor and friend Jeremy, and when Lucy spoke of a man dying from AIDS that she saw in the hospital, I immediately thought of him. When she carried on with her story, I brushed away the thought, but at the end her heartbreaking final thoughts circle back in what I thought was the most moving part of the story. She talks about what it was like to reconnect, or try to reconnect, with her estranged mother after all these years, and about her childhood and all the experiences that shaped her, but her story was mostly confiding in us about how lonely she was, no matter what she tried to do about it.
It’s really remarkable, and a testament to the skill of the writers as well as to Linney’s acting, how much the audience feels it knows Lucy and how much we learn about her life, simply by listening to her tell us about her hospital stay, something that seems so mundane and uninteresting. At the end, she again comes to the most downstage point and looks directly at us to share her most private thoughts and pains, pounding on her chest in one of the most powerful theatre moments. You’re so invested in Lucy’s emotional distress that you almost forget you’re watching Linney, as she makes a compelling London debut and receives a much-deserved standing ovation.
INFORMATION
The Bridge Theatre put in Linney’s programme bio that she was in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” but not that she was in “Dave”, the BEST MOVIE EVER and her character’s name was RANDI and she wasn’t a gross man so like FIX IT, BRIDGE.
Also fix your late seating policy. It was nonsense how many people were seated 20 minutes into the show. Just stop allowing late seating, all theatres. If someone is late and it’s not their fault let them exchange their tickets. I mean people who missed 20 minutes missed a LOT of information; it’s not even worth seeing it. And it was so distracting to everyone else.
STAGEDOOR
The stagedoor is around the side of the complex closest to Tower Bridge, past the Ivy restaurant and then next to the By Chloe that’s there. We only waited 10-15 minutes because it was disheartening to see how many Londoners were still supporting that restaurant’s shitty owners. Anyway, the people working inside said she isn’t consistent about which exit she uses, and I guess they couldn’t find out if she was planning to come out that way, and I was cold, so we left.
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Aspects of Love at the Southwark Playhouse: A.L. DUBS YOU GOT SOME SPLAININ TO DO!!!!
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about the new revival of Aspects of Love at London’s Southwark Playhouse, on until February 9. Run, don’t walk, to miss it.
Certain demons down at Bad Place headquarters are waiting for the creators of “Aspects of Love” – Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Don Black – to join them in their circus of torture, and have been ever since the show was written in 1989 (based on a novella by David Garnett). They will move into the neighborhood where Jared from Subway is heading, along with the guy who created Girls Gone Wild. They’ll all fit together nicely. And into their little torture neighborhood, we will add whoever though it was a good idea to revive this monstrosity of a show at the Southwark Playhouse this season. A rare miss from a theatre whose work we usually adore, “Aspects of Love” is an affront to decent humans. Sure, we are realizing with each passing day that there are fewer and fewer decent humans among us in this brave new world of ours, but that doesn’t excuse this portrayal of domestic abuse, misogyny, incest and more as normal, or worse, as anything remotely resembling love.
Certain demons down at Bad Place headquarters are waiting for the creators of “Aspects of Love” – Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Don Black – to join them in their circus of torture, and have been ever since the show was written in 1989 (based on a novella by David Garnett). They will move into the neighborhood where Jared from Subway is heading, along with the guy who created Girls Gone Wild. They’ll all fit together nicely. And into their little torture neighborhood, we will add whoever though it was a good idea to revive this monstrosity of a show at the Southwark Playhouse this season. A rare miss from a theatre whose work we usually adore, “Aspects of Love” is an affront to decent humans. Sure, we are realizing with each passing day that there are fewer and fewer decent humans among us in this brave new world of ours, but that doesn’t excuse this portrayal of domestic abuse, misogyny, incest and more as normal, or worse, as anything remotely resembling love.
Frank Rich’s 1990 review of the Broadway production in the failing New York Times has one of my favorite Frank Rich lines of all time OF ALL TIME. He states that while ALW has written a musical about people (as opposed to cats), “whether ‘Aspects of Love’ is a musical for people is another matter.” I mean get Dubs to the ER for those burns am I right. The story presented here is offensive, despicable, and all around gross. The main idea is that it’s about love in all these various forms, in all these different romances depicted. The problem is, none of it is love, NONE OF IT, and putting some of these relationships forward as love – as opposed to what they really are, toxic power trips or ACTUAL CRIMES – is irresponsible and disturbing.
Let’s get into it, shall we? “Aspects of Love” is about a boy named Alex living in France who is obsessed with a local actress. Alex is 17 years old, so a minor, if they count things like that in France. He goes to the actress, Rose, after a show one night and is like, hot damn I love you, even though I don’t know you and this is the first time we’ve ever spoken, that’s love. Rose’s show is cancelled and she’s broke, so Alex says she can come stay with him in his uncle’s villa for a few weeks. Rose decides that spending a few weeks having an affair with a minor is a good solution to a problem that could also be solved ANY OTHER WAY. Off Rose and the child Alex go to the uncle’s villa, happy in their disgusting little bubble of impropriety until the uncle finds out and goes to disrupt their fun. The uncle, George, finds them one evening when Rose is wearing George’s dead wife’s gown. Naturally, this upsets him, but not because it’s a flagrant overstep on the part of a guest. No, it’s because he is attracted to Rose, who looks a lot like his dead wife in this gown, and he apologizes to her for his being upset instead of making her apologize to him for wearing the damn dress and at THIS point I was ready to scream at everyone for being wrong and dumb so you can imagine how I felt when shit really hit the fan. Rose decides to leave Alex after a week or so and go back to the stage. They say that they love each other a few times and you are like a) you don’t even know each other and b) so gross.
Two years later, Alex has joined the army so he has a gun, important plot point. He goes to visit his uncle George and lo and behold, guess who is at his apartment? ROSE, who is now George’s mistress. Alex is so upset and scolds Rose for sleeping with his uncle just for his money, but Rose says she really loves George. She ALSO says that she really loved Alex two years ago and so they have sex again in George’s apartment. The next day, Rose tells Alex he has to go before George returns, so Alex THREATENS TO SHOOT HER, because that’s what real love is. How dare you not love me back when I love you so much, Alex says, I love you so much that I’d rather kill you than see you be happy with someone else! SURE GUYS. Rose is like dude stop it and she throws a candlestick at him, which makes him fire the gun “accidentally” but not really an accident because you’re forking POINTING A LOADED GUN AT HER and threatening to shoot her so like not really an UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCE YOU LITTLE SHIT, and Rose is shot in the arm and faints. And then George arrives and instead of taking Rose to a hospital or something, he and Alex sing about how much they love her and how they think the other one is the best man for her AS SHE IS PASSED OUT. George is literally singing to Alex that maybe he is the right man for Rose because he clearly loves her so much and has such strong passion that it made him shoot her. I CANNOT.
George goes to see his other mistress, Giulietta, and it looks like Rose and Alex will stay together even though he just shot her but she soon orders him to leave so she can go race after George. Rose and Giulietta meet, and they’re like ‘oh you’re not as bad as I expected you to be, let’s be friends/lovers’ and then Rose and George get married with Giulietta as the witness and they form this gross little threesome and George is skeevily elated and that’s Act 1.
I didn’t think Act II could be worse, but I was mistaken. In Act II, the married couple George and Rose have a daughter, Jenny, who has a crush on Alex, HER COUSIN. When Jenny is 14 and Alex is 34, Alex is visiting the villa and Jenny puts on the gown that Rose first put on, the dead wife’s gown. George, instead of being like ‘it’s forking weird that my daughter is dressing up like my dead wife and I’m super attracted to women who wear this gown’, decides the right thing to do is dance with Jenny in a gross manner. When alone, Jenny and Alex dance in a very very inappropriate manner. Jenny tells Alex that she loves him and they kiss. Again, 14, and 34. AND COUSINS.
Later, Alex is putting Jenny to bed one evening and Jenny tells him how much she loves him. Alex sings to himself about all his complicated feelings (he is attracted to his child cousin; not complicated, go away from her) and George overhears and assumes they’ve been having sex and he HAS A HEART ATTACK AND DIES.
At George’s wake, Alex and Giulietta meet and they have sex. Then Alex tells Jenny that their relationship can’t continue, and then he tries to leave but Rose begs him not to leave because she loves him too, and then the whole building explodes from the sheer unbelievability of how fucked up this show is and how they are treating domestic abuse, incest, and pedophilia as acceptable kinds of love.
I know what you’re thinking – all of this must be put forth as satire or criticism of these people and what they think love is, right? Like the art of it must be that they are presenting this as super fucked up and not love at all, RIGHT? Sadly, no. There would be merit in presenting this story with a commentary on how it’s wrong or bad or literally ANY kind of commentary, but this is purely a celebration of this super fuckeduppery as ‘love’.
If you would like to know how the show is aside from the plot, because the entire story is something you can definitely ignore to focus on what, the melodies? then sure let’s talk about that. It is garbage. True, it has created a standard in musical theatre, the opening song “Love Changes Everything”, and it is indeed a catchy, hummable tune that is inoffensive and extraordinarily ordinary. So that’s say five points in their favor. But an easy way to lose those points is, instead of writing other decent melodies and improving the rest of the score, simply repeating “Love Changes Everything” ad infinitum in seemingly endless reprises. If we say minus 1 point for every reprise or repetition of the main LCE theme, they end the show with a total of negative eleventy billion points. And the rest of the score is cringeworthy. I honestly have never cringed so much at a score. It doesn’t help that virtually all of it is sung-through, with what should be dialogue in book scenes replaced with opera-style recitative. It is very hard to make that stylistic choice work in musicals. It does not work here. The melodies chosen for these scenes are the equivalent of when Buddy the Elf in ‘Elf’ tries to explain to Zooey Deschanel that singing is just like talking but you move your voice up and down and then to demonstrate he just sing-shouts “I’M SINGING! I’M IN A STORE AND I’M SIIIINGIIIING” to no real tune, just random tones. That’s what this score is. And the lyrics, good god. When the uncle finds out that his (minor) nephew is affairing it up at his country house with an actress, he sing-shouts “How handy! My bed, my brandy!” I literally HEARD the sound my husband’s face made as he tried to contain his shudder of abhorrence. It hurts in my tumnus to think about that line and the hundreds like it.
I honestly don’t believe that someone okayed this revival of this production like it’s a classic that doesn’t need modern social commentary or new direction to show that none of this is okay. It is clear that those involved don’t see any problem with these storylines and are okay with saying that ‘that’s love.’ And none of the (old men) reviewing this for the big publications seem to find any problem with it because men are disgusting. I can’t believe this is a real show. Also it’s 2 hours and 40 minutes, which is just adding insult to injury. Unless this show was redone as a primer on What Not to Do in the #MeToo Era, it needs to be put away for good. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.
Let’s get into it, shall we? “Aspects of Love” is about a boy named Alex living in France who is obsessed with a local actress. Alex is 17 years old, so a minor, if they count things like that in France. He goes to the actress, Rose, after a show one night and is like, hot damn I love you, even though I don’t know you and this is the first time we’ve ever spoken, that’s love. Rose’s show is cancelled and she’s broke, so Alex says she can come stay with him in his uncle’s villa for a few weeks. Rose decides that spending a few weeks having an affair with a minor is a good solution to a problem that could also be solved ANY OTHER WAY. Off Rose and the child Alex go to the uncle’s villa, happy in their disgusting little bubble of impropriety until the uncle finds out and goes to disrupt their fun. The uncle, George, finds them one evening when Rose is wearing George’s dead wife’s gown. Naturally, this upsets him, but not because it’s a flagrant overstep on the part of a guest. No, it’s because he is attracted to Rose, who looks a lot like his dead wife in this gown, and he apologizes to her for his being upset instead of making her apologize to him for wearing the damn dress and at THIS point I was ready to scream at everyone for being wrong and dumb so you can imagine how I felt when shit really hit the fan. Rose decides to leave Alex after a week or so and go back to the stage. They say that they love each other a few times and you are like a) you don’t even know each other and b) so gross.
Two years later, Alex has joined the army so he has a gun, important plot point. He goes to visit his uncle George and lo and behold, guess who is at his apartment? ROSE, who is now George’s mistress. Alex is so upset and scolds Rose for sleeping with his uncle just for his money, but Rose says she really loves George. She ALSO says that she really loved Alex two years ago and so they have sex again in George’s apartment. The next day, Rose tells Alex he has to go before George returns, so Alex THREATENS TO SHOOT HER, because that’s what real love is. How dare you not love me back when I love you so much, Alex says, I love you so much that I’d rather kill you than see you be happy with someone else! SURE GUYS. Rose is like dude stop it and she throws a candlestick at him, which makes him fire the gun “accidentally” but not really an accident because you’re forking POINTING A LOADED GUN AT HER and threatening to shoot her so like not really an UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCE YOU LITTLE SHIT, and Rose is shot in the arm and faints. And then George arrives and instead of taking Rose to a hospital or something, he and Alex sing about how much they love her and how they think the other one is the best man for her AS SHE IS PASSED OUT. George is literally singing to Alex that maybe he is the right man for Rose because he clearly loves her so much and has such strong passion that it made him shoot her. I CANNOT.
George goes to see his other mistress, Giulietta, and it looks like Rose and Alex will stay together even though he just shot her but she soon orders him to leave so she can go race after George. Rose and Giulietta meet, and they’re like ‘oh you’re not as bad as I expected you to be, let’s be friends/lovers’ and then Rose and George get married with Giulietta as the witness and they form this gross little threesome and George is skeevily elated and that’s Act 1.
I didn’t think Act II could be worse, but I was mistaken. In Act II, the married couple George and Rose have a daughter, Jenny, who has a crush on Alex, HER COUSIN. When Jenny is 14 and Alex is 34, Alex is visiting the villa and Jenny puts on the gown that Rose first put on, the dead wife’s gown. George, instead of being like ‘it’s forking weird that my daughter is dressing up like my dead wife and I’m super attracted to women who wear this gown’, decides the right thing to do is dance with Jenny in a gross manner. When alone, Jenny and Alex dance in a very very inappropriate manner. Jenny tells Alex that she loves him and they kiss. Again, 14, and 34. AND COUSINS.
Later, Alex is putting Jenny to bed one evening and Jenny tells him how much she loves him. Alex sings to himself about all his complicated feelings (he is attracted to his child cousin; not complicated, go away from her) and George overhears and assumes they’ve been having sex and he HAS A HEART ATTACK AND DIES.
At George’s wake, Alex and Giulietta meet and they have sex. Then Alex tells Jenny that their relationship can’t continue, and then he tries to leave but Rose begs him not to leave because she loves him too, and then the whole building explodes from the sheer unbelievability of how fucked up this show is and how they are treating domestic abuse, incest, and pedophilia as acceptable kinds of love.
I know what you’re thinking – all of this must be put forth as satire or criticism of these people and what they think love is, right? Like the art of it must be that they are presenting this as super fucked up and not love at all, RIGHT? Sadly, no. There would be merit in presenting this story with a commentary on how it’s wrong or bad or literally ANY kind of commentary, but this is purely a celebration of this super fuckeduppery as ‘love’.
If you would like to know how the show is aside from the plot, because the entire story is something you can definitely ignore to focus on what, the melodies? then sure let’s talk about that. It is garbage. True, it has created a standard in musical theatre, the opening song “Love Changes Everything”, and it is indeed a catchy, hummable tune that is inoffensive and extraordinarily ordinary. So that’s say five points in their favor. But an easy way to lose those points is, instead of writing other decent melodies and improving the rest of the score, simply repeating “Love Changes Everything” ad infinitum in seemingly endless reprises. If we say minus 1 point for every reprise or repetition of the main LCE theme, they end the show with a total of negative eleventy billion points. And the rest of the score is cringeworthy. I honestly have never cringed so much at a score. It doesn’t help that virtually all of it is sung-through, with what should be dialogue in book scenes replaced with opera-style recitative. It is very hard to make that stylistic choice work in musicals. It does not work here. The melodies chosen for these scenes are the equivalent of when Buddy the Elf in ‘Elf’ tries to explain to Zooey Deschanel that singing is just like talking but you move your voice up and down and then to demonstrate he just sing-shouts “I’M SINGING! I’M IN A STORE AND I’M SIIIINGIIIING” to no real tune, just random tones. That’s what this score is. And the lyrics, good god. When the uncle finds out that his (minor) nephew is affairing it up at his country house with an actress, he sing-shouts “How handy! My bed, my brandy!” I literally HEARD the sound my husband’s face made as he tried to contain his shudder of abhorrence. It hurts in my tumnus to think about that line and the hundreds like it.
I honestly don’t believe that someone okayed this revival of this production like it’s a classic that doesn’t need modern social commentary or new direction to show that none of this is okay. It is clear that those involved don’t see any problem with these storylines and are okay with saying that ‘that’s love.’ And none of the (old men) reviewing this for the big publications seem to find any problem with it because men are disgusting. I can’t believe this is a real show. Also it’s 2 hours and 40 minutes, which is just adding insult to injury. Unless this show was redone as a primer on What Not to Do in the #MeToo Era, it needs to be put away for good. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.
Shipwreck at the Almeida Theatre: A Messy Look at the World Post-Trump
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the brand-new work Shipwreck, playing at London’s Almeida Theatre until March 30.
Anne Washburn writes some of the most intriguing plays of recent times, usually saying something interesting but in a strange, off-kilter way that heightens the story. Unfortunately, Shipwreck, the ‘Donald Trump play’, as it’s known, hasn’t managed to harmonize the ‘things to say’ with the ‘strange’ in a way that makes three hours of thinking about Cheeto Mussolini worthwhile. The messages Washburn finds important to share with us are conveyed mainly in monologues and often told directly to the audience, rather than through character interaction, a contrivance that often seems like cheating. The expected weirdness from her works comes in random spurts, and while some of it works, some of it really doesn’t, and all of it would be better suited to a framework built for the more fantastical aspects.
From the title, I assumed the tale would involve an actual shipwreck that would be an allegory for the current political situation, something complex and deep that reflected the Angry Creamsicle’s mess in a sophisticated way. Or just in any metaphorical sense. To my surprise, it’s literally about a group of liberal friends complaining about the Carrot Demon, just flat out, nothing complex about it. There’s even a meta moment where the characters talk about how political plays that aren’t metaphorical are always less effective and too specific. So…that’s true, guys. I get that it’s hard to write a play about a situation that changes by the minute, as it’s both important to document the current times and impossible for the work to remain current, but to literally acknowledge that, what, you know it won’t be successful? It’s weird. Is it a self-own?
I was still open-minded and hoping to find deeper meaning, perhaps in the setting – a remote farmhouse, a new acquisition of one of the couples, during a severe snowstorm where they hadn’t stocked up on food. The group is forced to eat old frozen hotdogs and use ketchup as a main ingredient in pasta, which could indicate the kind of desperate trouble we’re all in. Yet the farmhouse scenes – the vast majority of the play – mainly feature the friends talking, complaining, arguing about politics and rehashing the same kinds of statements most of us have given or heard for the past three years. In the rare instances when they say something new – like when Khalid Abdalla’s character asks whether, since nothing else has saved the world, maybe this Dark Wizard is actually the answer – it feels like nonsense. His character seems like a fairly together dude; surely he knows that we’ve tried literally nothing to try to save the world, so what on earth would persuade him to believe a farfetched mysticism that’s so ridiculous?
Despite strong acting throughout (and really good accent work all around, so pleased), the only ‘normal’ character that had a real effect was Fisayo Akinade as a black child (and then adult) adopted by a conservative white family. I wish there was more of him and his story; perhaps it wouldn’t have felt so random and the ‘payoff’ realization at the end so underwhelming.
Because so much of the play is straightforward, mostly unoriginal talking points, the trademark Washburn bits we do get feel entirely out of place. And not in a good ‘oh this is dramatically jarring’ kind of way, but in a ‘why hasn’t the entire show been this absurdist’ kind of way. Although I did not think the battle royale between George W. Bush and Trump worked (and it went on way too long), I still appreciated that they were doing something different. The device with James Comey coming to dinner felt a bit underdeveloped, but his scenes with a golden-brushed Caligula-like Trump character were effective. I would have loved if Elliot Cowan played this crazy emperor-god looking dude the entire show, even though at times, when his voice echoed the exact vocal inflections that Cadet Bone Spurs does, I threw up in my mouth a little, and even though associating his muscular physique with the president’s is too kind. These scenes give the kind of fascinating take on this situation we expected from a Washburn show, not one that is 90% talking to us about how bad things are and how we are probably part of the problem.
And I am so sick of all the clichés. I’m sick of the clichés about why people voted for a Curdled Orange Julius. Oh, you’re scared of immigrants hurting the economy? Well, you’re an idiot; should I feel sorry for your ignorance or just keep being angry? I’m sick of the clichés about how terrible white liberals are. Yes white women are hella annoying but it’s not original or funny to have a white liberal woman character who isn’t perfect but who tries to do the right thing, and to use her mistakes to lambast all liberals. Isn’t trying to be a good person and an ally better than openly being a shitty person? Sure they all desperately need to be sent copies of “So You Want To Talk About Race” but their need for some racial education doesn’t make them worse than racists.
This kind of screwed up discourse we have in society, with demanding perfection from those trying to be decent humans while allowing shitty humans to be as shitty as they want, leads me to my biggest problem with this play. I am tired of hearing that liberals may be the problem, or that we are the ones who have to try harder to connect with republicans/Trumplethinskin supporters and try to see things from their perspectives, to try to get out of our bubbles and understand the other side. BULLSHIT. No one ever asks Fox News viewers to get out of their bubbles, and their bubbles aren’t even escapable; they are made of cement. No one ever asks the people who think that black people all get free college or that jews control all the money and the government or that homosexuality is god’s punishment for women in the workplace or that killing refugee babies brings them closer to Jesus to even take a peek outside their fucked up bubbles. No, it’s always the people who give a shit about decency for all humans that are told it’s our responsibility to understand why these people hate minorities and women and can’t think rationally about anything. I am goddamn sick of it. It doesn’t make you shrewd or sensible to again ask ‘but maybe it’s liberals who are the problem’ and not ‘but maybe conservatives are literally destroying the world with their ignorance and hate?’ It makes you lazy, irresponsible, and negligent at best. I still cannot believe that this seminal, first major play about Fuckface Von Clownstick is offering these same tired excuses. And that’s my main problem with it.
Also three hours thinking about the Tangerine Tornado is absurd.
INFORMATION
Honestly, the worst part wasn’t the general disappointment or the revulsion at having to think about Toilet Emoji President for three hours. It was the cigarette smoke that overwhelmed the theatre. We saw up in the circle, which you have to enter from a different door from street level. Those doors are open during preshow and the interval, and asshats are literally smoking in the doorways, and asshat staff are doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to keep them away from the entrances. So their asshat smoke wafted clear up the stairs and into the entire circle, so badly that I had trouble breathing at times, and I don’t even have asthma. Preshow, they did the same for the general entrance and the lobby. DO BETTER.
