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April 6, 2004
TT: Near misses
As I read over this morning's Pulitzer coverage, I noticed that the runners-up for the drama prize that went to Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife were a pair of plays I panned in The Wall Street Journal.One was Omnium Gatherum. With all due respect to Old Hag's current guest blogger, who loved it, I thought otherwise:
For openers, the play, co-written by Theresa Rebeck ("Bad Dates") and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, is a drawing-room comedy set at a chic dinner party in what at first blush appears to be a high-rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero. The dizzy hostess (Kristine Nielsen) and her guests are all coarsely realized caricatures: an ultra-fey Cambridge don (Dean Nolen), a cosmopolitan Arab (Edward A. Hajj), a you-go-girl black matron (Melanna Gray), a humorless vegan (Jenny Bacon), even a loud-mouthed right-winger (Phillip Clark). (I'd like to see the chic dinner party to which he got invited.) In an inept attempt at subtlety, each guest is made to say one or two things inconsistent with his or her caricature--though somebody ought to tell the authors that making the fey Brit a raving Israel-hater was more accurate than they might have guessed.
What next? Well, Guest No. 6 turns out to be a fireman (Joseph Lyle Taylor), who (of course) speaks in dese-dem-doseisms and (also of course) has a climactic monologue in which he tells what he saw on 9/11. The witty chit-chat (next to none of which is amusing) degenerates into boozy sniping. The vegan confesses that she's...pregnant! The hostess announces that she's invited a Mystery Guest (Amir Arison), who turns out to be...an Arab terrorist! The fireman admits that he's really...dead! In fact, all the guests are dead, and as if that weren't enough of a cliché, they're in hell. So is the audience, though most of them didn't seem to know it, since I heard no groans when this last fact was revealed....
My personal trainer, who knows a thing or two about pop culture, recently described "Seabiscuit" to me as "a smart movie for dumb people." "Omnium Gatherum," by contrast, is a dumb play for--and by--people who think they're smart.
No less horrible was Man from Nebraska, which I saw on a trip to Chicago in January:
I was appalled by Tracy Letts's "Man From Nebraska"...in which Ken Carpenter (Rick Snyder), a Baptist family man from Lincoln, Neb., awakes one morning to find he has lost his faith. He thereupon embarks on a pilgrimage to London, where he falls in with Tamyra (Karen Aldridge), an arty bartender, and Harry (Michael Shannon), a mediocre sculptor. These enlightened folk introduce the benighted Ken to the Religion of Art, and he returns to Lincoln a fully fledged member of the herd of independent minds, there to renounce fundamentalism, fast food and small-town narrowness. Such smug little exercises in cross-cultural condescension are par for the course in the capital of Blue America, but I wasn't expecting to stumble across one in the City of the Big Shoulders. I guess there's no hate like self-hate: Mr. Letts, a member of the Steppenwolf ensemble, was born and raised in Oklahoma....
Two bullets dodged! I'd say that's a good day's work.
Posted April 6, 2004 7:00 AM
