Third

[sistermagpie]

Last night I went to see Wendy Wasserstein's new play, Third. I don't care for WW, so I wasn't really looking forward to it. It's gotten pretty good reviews that I've seen, it's her best play in years etc.

I still didn't like it. But I'm having trouble really explaining why. With The Heidi Chronicles I remember coming out and being able to say what things annoyed me, but in this play I couldn't really question the "message" since most of the stuff I'd come up with was stuff that was intentional and shown up as wrong etc. There were some effecting moments in it, but I still just found myself sitting there feeling a dull dislike through the whole thing.



I think part of the issue was Third himself, that is Woodson Bull III (Jason Ritter), the title character. The basic story concerns Laurie Jameson, a professor at an unnamed but super elite smarty-pants New England University. We’re told people come to the school to study with her--she's famous for things like her readings of things like King Lear that boil down to women being forced into bad gender roles. She's also dealing with a father with Alzheimer's who has his own Lear-like rants, a daughter who's disappointing for not being bisexual and living with a Guggenheim poet like her sister and a best friend with cancer.

Laurie hates Third from the moment she learns he's on a wrestling scholarship and went to Groton and has a number after his name and wants to be a sports agent, immediately turning him into George W. Bush in her imagination. She accuses him of plagiarizing his intelligent paper on King Lear because no one with his interests could write intelligently about Shakespeare, and somehow this is enough to get him in front of an Academic Committee. Laurie's friend provides the vote that keeps Third at school (breaking a tie--a tie!--when there's not a shred of evidence against him and he is able to argue his paper well and quote plenty of academic sources on Shakespeare, plus his paper on Reggie Jackson is just is articulate). Third then starts to become a little more bitter, and does a big speech in the cafeteria linking the way he's been treated to the loss of the election: "You all say you can't figure out what's going on out west, but when someone from the Midwest (Third's from Ohio, get it?) comes to you for answers they're dismissed before they can say anything.) Third's really okay, and not rich at all, see, and Laurie's accusation leads to him losing his scholarship, losing his spot on the team and sending his father, who loves the school so much and I think went there along with his grandfather (thus giving Laurie the impression he's rich) into a depression.

Eventually Third goes to Ohio State, where Laurie had said he "belonged" more anyway, don’t ask me why, because he seems perfectly fine ivy league material to me. He's also gotten a purely academic scholarship to Stanford that isn't enough money, because he's gotten straight A's in ancient Greek and his gay and lesbian study class etc.

I think the play is supposed to be brave for making that liberal elite confront the stereotypes, but as usual I feel like WW just assumes that her own limited perspective is everywhere. It’s like she’s still obsessed with herself, but now I’m watching her berate herself. This seems kind of arrogant and false. I mean...so swing voters in Ohio voted for Bush because they all had to meet annoying people like Laurie Jameson and get insulted by her? Couldn't those people have voted based on, you know, actual issues concerning their own life and not their reaction to Laurie? In reading other reviews I've seen these references to a "mystery" in the play, which I think is supposed to refer to the plagiarism accusation, but it's just not a mystery. There's no reason to believe Third cheated ever. When Third goes to Laurie's friend to complain she wanders off on a tangent about how if you want to take what you learn in college and use it just to make money, you are "guilty" somehow--um, yeah. The point is he obviously didn’t buy a paper off the Internet so why should he be punished?

It's not about plagiarism, it's about Laurie, just as her daughter's dropping out of Swarthmore to live with her bank-teller boyfriend is about Laurie. "This is my last chance not to become you!" Emily yells at her mother, as if she can’t have her own personality and a degree from Swarthmore. Why does her stupid choice have to be about making a point to her mother? (This, too, is kind of addressed when Third, who is tending bar to pay for college now that his scholarship is gone, responds to her saying she doesn't know what to do what her mom wants or her boyfriend wants by asking her what she wants.) If she wants to drop out of school to be somebody's girlfriend why can't that just be her own decision based on what she wants to do? She'll probably be back after bumming around for a year or something. She's not saving herself from anything by dropping out of college.

So back to Third himself. I think my biggest problem with him was that he's a great big Gary Stu. Seriously. You've never seen a more perfect student. People I know who teach college have to deal with kids who can't even get to the final without whining for a reschedule, or hand in a paper on time because they had a fight with their boyfriend. Third goes to Laurie to say that he can't attend a screening of King Lear because he's got a wrestling match that day (something I would assume he must attend given his scholarship) and she when tells him he has to see it he tracks down the obscure production at the Museum of Broadcasting, goes to NYC and watches it there (the whole team goes with him--jocks are great!).

In general, Third's interest in sports seems very pastede on yay. He's apologetic about the stuff he has to do for wrestling. His desire to be a sports agent seems quite at odds with his personality. Of course it's just a job so it shouldn’t dominate his personality, but it just doesn't seem connected to him at all. Laurie hates the idea because being an agent is about "making deals" (and therefore money). And she's right, really. That is what an agent does. So why does Third seem so completely *not* about making deals? He doesn't seem in any way aggressive enough to be an agent. He doesn't seem to fight his scholarship being taken away, he just tries to "get through" his hearing. You'd think someone who wants to fight for other people to get more money would fight for himself.

The reason he doesn't, imo, is because underneath it all he has to be perfect. Laurie's prejudice has to be just be completely off the mark, maybe because if Third gave her a reason for feeling this way it would be less about Laurie and Third would be an adversary rather than just the nicest kid in the world she treats badly. Yes, he's white, straight and male, but he actually came to this college to expose himself to diversity and learn stuff! He intentionally picks classes in feminist readings of Elizabethan Drama and Gay and Lesbian studies--and takes them seriously. He's amazingly lacking in the sense of entitlement department. In fact, when he unknowingly drunkenly rants to Laurie’s daughter that her mother is a “self-promoting cunt” and Emily shows displeasure at the word (“excuse me?”) he seems genuinely horrified with himself and literally falls at her feet in what read to me as genuine shame. I wonder if the rest of the wrestling team is that sensitive. I mean, Third even admits at the end that in the real world he’s the one who’s normal, so it’s good he got a chance to be treated like “the other,” but that’s also why I wonder why he lacks that sense of entitlement. (It also just continues to seem bizarre to me to suggest that a good-looking, athletic, very intelligent white boy is a “freak” in an ivy league undergrad setting.)

Yes, Third’s got a number in his name but he calls himself Third rather than “Trip” so he doesn’t have a bad nickname. (Honestly, I know the stereotype of people with numbers after their name being total preppies, but is it really that unusual amongst regular, hard-working folks? I grew up with a regular boy with a number. We just called him George, and occasionally to distinguish the adults would call him “George the Fourth.” His son is now called “Cinquo.”) Oh, and apart from a few lines about Reggie Jackson there to disgust Laurie and establish he's supposed to be into that kind of thing, Third’s mostly quoting Shakespeare or Our Town because he just loves plays. What a prince. You'd think Laurie would pounce on that and just tell herself that Third’s gay to make him acceptable (in response to being accused of being Republican Third shouts that Abraham Lincoln was one, and Laurie says, "That was different! He might have been gay!). Also, Third’s pro-choice and while he never says anything in support of the Iraq war, he is prone to speaking respectfully about the troops, which always gets him accused of being a Republican. And in case you might think the athletic scholarship draws in athletically-focused students, Third is a straight-A student in obscure academic classes, and according to him athletes are just there to get one picture in the yearbook and not given any respect at the school at all.

Laurie decides Third is the "personification of a red state" which already makes me wonder what exactly that means (sadly, I guess Laurie is the personification of a blue state, and that's depressing). (The whole thing gets annoyingly confusing for me anyway, because Third is tagged as a big red state when he went to Groton and his high school girlfriend is at Yale and he’s at whatever fake Ivy he’s supposed to be at. It’s like musical stereotypes. "Red State" just seems to mean something to WW it doesn't mean to me.)

Later he seems to embrace that role when he stands as a representative from Ohio who's been dissed when he "came to you for answers." And there we go again with Third being everything perfect in the eyes of Laurie and her creator, it seems to me. Why assume anyone who lived in Ohio and voted for Bush came to "us" for answers? Laurie is criticized for her over-emphasis on academic achievement and ivy league schools, but of course Third shares that love himself or he wouldn't be at the school. Third merely represents the "true" love of academia that Laurie has lost sight of.

I guess I found myself thinking this whole story was a big set up, almost related to those stories that people tell where they create a strong man character to argue against, you know? Like you'll get the story of the rude atheist student who claims God doesn't exist only to be blown away by the Christian teacher. The student says exactly what the teacher needs him to say to tell him off, because both characters come out of a Creationist head. In this case you've got two people with basically the same values, only Laurie spends the whole play accusing Third of not having them so there's some threat he might change his mind or something. I couldn't help but wonder if it would just be more interesting if Third was more what Laurie hates. God knows, it's not like there aren't plenty of people who do. I tend to think that was more an issue in how they voted than a petty grudge against tedious academics. The east coast intellectual elite seems like such a favorite of right-wing propagandists—they’re part of that gang of homosexuals who are destroying marriage and the atheists who are taking God away and all that, but I just see limited advantage to buying into that idea and saying that yes, they have driven these poor, good souls away with their prejudice against white males. Maybe it doesn't all come down to you, Laurie.

I don't know if I've gotten any closer to anything. Probably at base it's just that I don't care about Wendy Wasserstein's endless search for who she's supposed to be. Usually I'm just annoyed by her sulky swipes at women who are not like her or are, even more damningly, younger than she is. This play avoids that, at least--there are no evil career women who raise children and have high-powered jobs to make Wendy Heidi Laurie feel inferior at least. I just still, like I said, felt like I was sitting there with this leaden feeling of not really liking anybody. I kept reading how it’s dealing with all these issues, but it seemed like it was dealing with artificial issues. I didn’t much care for Jason Ritter, either, whom everybody seems to think was really good. Maybe this was just because Third came across as so perfect. To me it seemed like mostly all Jason Ritter did was wave his hand a lot. A lot. Like I started thinking it might fall off if he kept doing it.

The one good thing about the play is I do always love Amy Aquino and Dianne Weist totally reminds me of petitesoeur, a little lefty herself. It’s not that the character "was" her at all, but something about her voice and her mannerisms are just eerily ps-like, so I couldn’t help but like her.

Comments

[meyerlemon.livejournal.com]

Good lord! That sounds profoundly awful and unlikeable.

Sigh.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Hee! OMG, you read all that--you get a prize! Other people seemed to really like it and find it funny, but I just could barely get myself to clap.

[meyerlemon.livejournal.com]

It sounds like the kind of thing that would make me flail wildly and ask if no one else thought it was odd that so much was being made of the SCANDAL of a white dude from allegedly rich family attending an Ivy, as though their ordinary student population is all people who grew up behind a dumpster in an alley.

SIGH!!!!!

Okay, see, sometimes live theater makes me want to stab someone, because it's like, sometimes writers *need* to be reined in a little, and... yes.

[kaskait.livejournal.com]

That sounded dreary, I'm sorry you had to sit through it. I was never partial to Wasserstein myself. So I would never have gone to see it. I admire you giving it a shot.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I didn't pay for it, so I can't claim to be too much of a martyr.:-) Dinner was great!

[dorrie6.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I'm not a fan of The Heidi Chronicles either, and for much the same reasons as you, I think.

It sounds to me like the play would have been more interesting if both Laurie and Third had been more well-rounded characters, with obvious flaws and obvious strengths. I would have bought the whole Ohio Republican speech more then, too. I mean, the argument he made is one I heard from a lot of Republicans after the election--that they didn't vote for Democrats because Democrats always talk about and to them as if they are stupid. That argument doesn't seem genuine from Third, whether he has money or not.

Anyway, I'd write more, but my dog is barking and I need to figure out why. Later!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Right--and it did remind me of some things I remember reading on lj that I thought were silly after the election. Like this whole idea of voting out of spite because people didn't constantly tell them they were smart. It's very ironic, really, because to me it seems like the neocons treat them like they're stupid by encouraging them to vote against their own best interests and fear things that are of no threat to them. I remember one person on lj doing this big sad post about how unfair and intolerance it was for a gay person on her lj to defriend her just because she explained that she didn't care whether he had equal right or not. This, she felt, was prejudice against her as a Republican instead of, you know, not seeing any reason to "friend" a person who has told you that's what they think about you.

But you're right, coming from Third it was even less believable.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

There's this entire complex of stuff that comes out of a particular UWS, highly educated, wasp/jewish usually straight female (and very occasionally male) sensibility that is so darn pleased with itself and so thoroughly insular that it's almost impossible to watch. These people really have no interest whatsoever in anything that doesn't happen within their rarefied circuit, yet they fool themselves into thinking that circuit is the whole of everything, or at least the best of everything, that everyone aspires to; after all, look at the scholarship student types who come into their midst! I'm also thinking here of the truly atrocious Something's Gotta Give; of late Nora Ephron has been a major offender.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on Heidi. Is there a capsule you can give me, or some early post?

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I saw it, so now I'm trying to think about what it was, exactly. I remember she made this whole imo ridiculous speech where she was supposed to be speaking to her old prep school. She talked about being at the gym with younger women and all they were doing was changing their clothes and talking about their kids and jobs, and Heidi made it seem like this was this big affront to her because boo hoo, they make her feel inferior because she isn't like them. And I remember thinking--are you in junior high? Why are you judging yourself against this idealized version you have of these women? While at the same time judging them as being shallow and unworthy of the advantages you won for them as a woman of the 60s?

At the time I was in college myself and maybe I kept thinking how awful it must have been to be in the audience of that prep school speech. Here you are in high school and this alumnae is just supposed to make a speech and she has this whole breakdown about not fitting in with the other girls in the locker room. I maybe also thought that was typical that she would do this in front of what's supposed to be an audience of teenaged girls--of course she'd start talking about something they can't understand at all (not that she tries to make them understand it) and just make it into a public therapy session.

Also I didn't understand why she kept herself tied to this small group of people she'd met in college/prep school, seemingly just so that she could suffer when they "sold out" and she didn't. I remember being like--why don't you just make friends you approve of who like your academic work? Instead her friends were just like the women in the gym, making her feel inferior and also superior at the same moment.

I remember the ending has her adopt a baby, and there's also a climax where her pediatrician friend yells at her for focusing on herself so much when there are all these children dying of AIDS, and I know that neither of those worked for me, but I can't remember the play enough right now to say exactly why. I think with the doctor it maybe felt like again this tragedy was thrown in (maybe the doctor ran a clinic that was burned?) to be all about Heidi, even though ostensibly it was used to tell Heidi she should think about other people besides herself.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Something's Gotta Give

*has horrible flashbacks*
There should be a support group for people who've seen it...

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

The reason he doesn't, imo, is because underneath it all he has to be perfect. Laurie's prejudice has to be just be completely off the mark, maybe because if Third gave her a reason for feeling this way it would be less about Laurie and Third would be an adversary rather than just the nicest kid in the world she treats badly.

From your description, that really seems to be the case. It's like that Good Slytherin, you know? The one comes out of the blue and puts Draco in Azkaban nd saving Harry in the last second, amking Harry all "OMG, soooorry for having been so prejudiced against yoooou!" when it's not really Goodie Slyth he's been prejudiced against at all. Fake prejudice are the worst, because it's so frustrating seeing a topic that should be so loaded, treated in an artificial, heavy-handed, and seriously simplified way.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yes. It made me think of this quote by I-can't-remember-who, who was talking about the movie "Gentlemen's Agreement" where Gregory Peck pretends to be Jewish to find out about anti-Semitism. He said that the message of the movie was basically, "Be nice to that Jew. He might be Gregory Peck." Same idea.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

It's like, if you want to write a story about prejudice, there is at least two ways to do so. You can either have the hero being prejudicede to someone for stupid and superficial reasons, sending a message of "judging by appearance is wrong, Mkay?", or you can have the hero meeting someone he's prejudiced against, forcing him to question his own beliefs, which would be far more interesting. Third sounds a bit like "Oncle Tom" I'm sure that book as trying to make a statement against racism or slavery when it was written, but Tom is everything the White American Christian Elite thinks a "good negro" should be, rather than an actual realistic character. So today the book comes off as more racist than anti-racist, which was probably not intended.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Hee! You stole my comment. I was just gonna say, he's the Good Athlete! ;)
Who's different and Oppressed at the school, except for all the things that would differ someone from an ivy league school, since he's a white intelligent able-bodied young male? (Which would be a Hermione-esque thing. Make a pretend reason why someone is discriminated against, but nothing yukky like an actual difference or anything that has a negative effect on them.)

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

Which would be a Hermione-esque thing. Make a pretend reason why someone is discriminated against, but nothing yukky like an actual difference or anything that has a negative effect on them.

Yeah, we can't have anyone disliking Hermione for being, you know, an obnoxious know-it-all, who bosses people around, and shoves her own superiority into their faces. Except for Harry and Ron pre-troll, of course, but that's different and OK, because she changes to aquiese them.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Yup. Like how people dislike Harry because they've read lies about him in the newspapers, rather than for his personality.

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

That sounds dire! From what you've said I can't imagine how anyone gave it good reviews!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

LOL! They seemed to see things in it. Though the review I just read wasn't very good. That made me feel strangely validated, at least.

[gramarye1971]

Gah. I would've left by the interval.

As a palate-cleanser, may I suggest Alan Bennett's The History Boys? I saw it at the National when I was in London, and Playbill.com tells me that it's opening this coming April. I thought it was an excellent play, with Bennett's usual sense of the bizarre, and I found a quote from it that sums up one of the great messages the play presents:

'The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him.'

I'd love to see what you think of it, if you do get a chance to see it. ^_^

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

That does sound really good--I'll look out for it. Thanks!

I have tickets for Sweeney Todd later in the month. *squee!!*

[alula-auburn.livejournal.com]

[i]"This is my last chance not to become you!" Emily yells at her mother, as if she can’t have her own personality and a degree from Swarthmore.[/i]

Yes, we Swarthmore girls, being very, very stupid, are totally unable to make independent choices of any kind, and are thus forced to drop out and shack up with our bank-teller boyfriends so we don't become our batshit crazy mothers.

(Swarthmore references of any kind amuse me, but I don't think I could have sat through that play just for those, at least not with clenching my fists hard enough to draw blood).

I even have trouble following the reviews I've read--several of them seem to position Lauren as symbolic of a dying culture of academic pride and--huh? The way to defend academic pride is to randomly accuse people of cheating? (Then again, one of them found the line "walking Red State" to be supremely witty--maybe my silly fangirl crush on Tom Stoppard has ruined me theatrically for all time.) I think the comparison to those meanieatheist!stories is really spot-on--and my reaction to those have always been, people can't seriously think that's going to win them converts, can they? (Although I have a particular dislike for the ones where the atheist is teh mean! and bitter because his brother died, or something, and the Wise Old Christian explains it was God's will.)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yes and again--that's supposed to win you converts? And btw, being angry at God does not make you an atheists. Atheists can't be angry at God. God doesn't exist!

I'm so glad to have a Swarthmore person here, actually, because there was another reference to it that struck me as wrong. When Third explains that he's called Third because of his name she says how all the guys at Swarthmore with a Third are called "Trip." Third sarcastically says, "That's just so cute."

The implication seemed to me to be that, you now, Swarthmore is the kind of place where you get a lot of "Trips." (Though Emily is also making a big deal of claiming to have never even met a Republican, and the show is at the same time associating III-type names with Republicans, so who can follow it?) To me that connection just seemed odd. Certainly somebody with any name can show up at any school, but it seemed really odd to think of all these "Trips" at Swarthmore. Trip always seems like a sort of rich playboy partyboy name, and that seemed to be the way it was being used here, since they were making fun of the name and all. Yet the reputation I always associated with Swarthmore was the opposite--that it was a very serious academic school.

Trip is sort of a male version of "Muffy," you know? And if you're going to pick a stereotype name, I don't imagine a lot of Muffys at Swarthmore. Now, I went to Smith, and while we had our share of serious students and militant lesbians, we also had Muffys.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Now, I went to Smith, and while we had our share of serious students and militant lesbians, we also had Muffys.

I don't know much about American colleges (although depressingly, more so than UK ones probably.) But there's the Seven Sisters group of them, isn't there? Presumably just for girls? And Ivy League is the best colleges, like Princeton or Harvard? (We just have Oxford and Cambridge here, as far as famously good colleges go. As far as I know!)
And I only know this from the Simpsons ;) :

SMITH (muscular, carries lacrosse stick, husky voice): Play lacrosse with me!
BRYN MAWR: Or explore with me! (She and SMITH kiss.)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's and her Seven Sisters, who are the girls' colleges that go along with the 7 Ivy Leagues, which include Princeton and Harvard. They're all on the east coast too. I love that Simpsons.:-) Most of them are co-ed now.

Wendy Wasserstein went to Mount Holyoke, which is another 7 sister school that's still single sex.

[alula-auburn.livejournal.com]

I can say with confidence that I don't remember meeting a single "Trip" through my four years at Swarthmore.

And that does seem like a very odd reference--Swarthmore not only being seriously academic but also an environment where people tended to pride themselves on their geekiness rather than their cuteness. (And considering how many people 1)have never heard of Swarthmore and 2) are convinced it's a women's college and will actually argue with you about it if you admit this is not the case, it tends not to attract rich playboy types to the suburbs of Philadelphia).

I do wonder what that's about--I mean, I suppose it's possible that Swarthmore doesn't have quite as much leftist cachet as it did when we were supposedly the "Kremlin on the Crum [Creek]," but the idea of Swarthmore as a cutesy playboy school? Whoa.

On the other hand, we were all way too amused when we got a Simpsons reference! Matt Groening knows who we are, and even referenced us in a way that was accurate!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

That's just what my impression of it was. I've never been there, but I was always aware of it--I remember a friend of mine in high school almost went there. (She wound up at Wesleyan.) So yeah, the preppie Trip at Swarthmore just seemed very bizarre to me.

I totally remember it coming up on The Simpsons but now I can't remember what it was. (Slinkhard helpfully provided the Smith reference.)

Swarthmore randomness

[alula-auburn.livejournal.com]

It was in the episode where Lisa channels that Julia Butterfly lady and goes to live in a tree with Pacey from Dawson's Creek--Bart has a job handing out menus for a Thai restaurant or something and the owner explains his business strategy: "Get more customers. Send daughter to small liberal arts school, like Swarthmore. Maybe Sarah Lawrence. Call professors by first name." Then when Bart screws it up, he laments that his daughter will have to go to a state college where "serious students powerless against drunken jockocracy. Baseball caps everywhere."

It was especially amusing to me, because my parents had just read the Julia Butterfly memoir for their couple's book group and my dad was seething over it, and also Dawson's Creek was the first fandom I actually observed at length, in fascination, at the total bizarre quality of it all. So it was very neat to have an episode with so much randomness that was meaningful to me.

I went digging to see if I could find any reviews of the play from Swarthmore. The only one I found sort of nicely pointed out that if you're tired of smart people and don't want to be "overeducated," then, yeah, Swarthmore is probably "not the right place" for you. (Of course, in my experience the Swarthmore climate was a constant tension between being overeducated and making fun of oneself for that--I mean, if you're going to major in Interpretation Theory, God help you if you don't have a sense of humor about yourself. Then of course, when I fangirl-clapped because Robert Pinsky had a cameo on The Simpsons, my friends sort of gently petted me and simultaneously rolled their eyes. It is a very, very nice place to be a geek.)

Then again, apparently the administration is trying to market itself as less geeky these days--something most of the students thought was very, very silly.

[mondegreen.livejournal.com]

In this case you've got two people with basically the same values, only Laurie spends the whole play accusing Third of not having them so there's some threat he might change his mind or something. I couldn't help but wonder if it would just be more interesting if Third was more what Laurie hates.

I (like, totally) see what you're saying here. What's the point of having a signified "other" if he or she is going to be the very same (or at least have the same values) of the supposed "self"? You can say "Oh look, he's a man and he's athletic, he comes from the Midwest, has a number after his name, and OMG look how different he is!" but when his actions don't show his differentness, then yes. Flop.

And you're right. That is kind of self-centered to presume that people vote out of spite for people like WW. Maybe if I'm just nicer to the Christian fundamentalists who picket outside of the library, they'll stop their forcible conversion tactics? I shouldn't compare these fundamentalists to the swing-voters of Ohio (because they are entirely two different types of people), but it's basically the same approach WW is trying to suggest (although I've never seen the play).

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was just really bugging me the way that so many reviews seem to congratulate the play for "challenging" the beliefs of its audience--and since this was at the Mitzi Newhouse it was understood that the audience would mostly be New York intellectuals. But how is it challenging the prejudices with this completely homogenous group of characters? It never challenged the idea that being Republican was a bad thing, it just scolded Laurie for thinking that just because someone was white, straight and male they were Republican--which in my experience is hardly something east coast lefty intellectuals do, since plenty of them are white, male and straight!

[somthin-wicked.livejournal.com]

Hi. I stumbled across your journal and if I wasn't on a five minute break while studying for exams I'd be poking around a whole lot more because your LJ is very interesting. Hope you don't mind that I've friended you.

sufz

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Not at all--welcome!