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VANITY, from p.30
with whom she falls in love, is an unfortunately amateurish affair. The book, music, and lyrics are by Michael Antin, each as unfortunate as the next. The book is a hodgepodge of exposition without any character development and too many subplots — the lesbian cabaret owner, the brother in the Resistance, the subversive attempts to thwart the Nazis, not to mention the central love story. The lyrics of the songs are unsophisticated with forced rhymes that are telegraphed and painfully predictable. The music is banal and the songs often seem inappropriate to the action and inconsistent with the story’s themes. There is potentially a compel-
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TORCHES, from p.13
on softening white supremacists and neo-Nazis by referring to them as mere “nationalists?” They were marching alongside — or actually carrying — swastika flags, fergodsake! And I question the lax “seeming to equally condemn….” “Seeming?” No, he did equally condemn the counter-protestors along with the neo-Nazis. He equated them. That’s why his remarks were the subject of such outrage across the political spectrum. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and commentator Eugene Robinson hilariously opined on MSNBC’s “Hardball”: “It takes a lot to make Jeff Sessions look like a civil rights hero.” Meanwhile, the riot provided late-night talk show hosts with an opportunity to condemn Rumpy for
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CAN’T QUIT, from p.13
ers wasted little time slamming Trump for giving the rioters the kid glove treatment and offering only the mildest of reproof to violence “on many sides, many sides.” South Carolina was the “cradle of the Confederacy” and long embraced a white historical reading of the Civil War. But, it’s been several years since the Confederate Flag last flew over the State Capitol, and its senior senator, Lindsey Graham, up for reelection next year, pinned GayCityNews.nyc | August 17–30, 2017
“A Real Boy” is a play that sounds interesting as a concept. What would happen if you engineered a reverse Pinocchio where the boy became the puppet? In the hands of playwright Stephen Kaplan, unfortunately, the execution is so rambling and
disjointed that the idea bogs down almost from the outset. The story concerns a kindergartener who is the adopted son of two marionettes. When his teacher suspects the boy is abused, she refuses to return him to his parents and holes up in the classroom as controversy swirls around her. When the boy starts to grow strings and turn into a puppet himself, the teacher’s judgment is challenged. A politician tries to make hay out of the situation, but it all falls apart in the end. Kaplan attempts to use his conceit to make points about parenting, politics, and individuality, but the story is so convoluted and confused that it succeeds neither as absurdist comedy nor social commentary. In trying to pack so
many ideas into the play, none is fully developed. Under the direction of Audrey Alford, the staging is clumsy and confusing in 59E59’s tiny theater and the play lacks a point of view. Worse yet, the puppetry, a central element of the show, is unsophisticated and frustrating — and ends up feeling like a gimmick. With all the wonderful, expressive puppetry seen in recent productions, this is a major miss. The concept inevitably invites comparison to Ionesco’s masterpiece “Rhinoceros,” an absurdist critique of fascism’s rise that for all its comedy has a focus that “A Real Boy” lacks. In trying to do too much, Kaplan’s play achieves nothing, fi nally strung up by its own concept.
his obnoxious “many sides, many sides” remark; Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers all opened their shows on Monday night with sober, joke-free opening monologues about Rump’s lame response to the riot. Fallon, of course, dripped with sanctimony that even he appeared to acknowledge as such by way of the telltale smirk on his face as he read his remarks off the teleprompter. Colbert and Meyers, in notable contrast, managed to pull it off. The fact that the white supremacists conducted a nighttime, preriot parade with Tiki torches was the subject of much ridicule. As both Colbert and Meyers pointed out, the makers of Tiki torches issued a stronger condemnation of white supremacy than Rump. “Our brand is designed to enhance outdoor gatherings and to
help family and friends connect with each other at home in their yard,” Tiki Brand stated in a press release, “not to support neo-Nazi closet cases who favor tight white polo shirts and muscles that wouldn’t be out of place in Fire Island Pines.” Okay, I made the second half of that up, but the first part is a direct quote. “Mr. Trump, you didn’t have to rise to the oratorical level of FDR or JFK or Barack Obama,” or words to that effect, Seth Meyers commented; “All you had to do was rise to the level of the makers of Tiki torches.” Brilliant. And both Colbert and Meyers drew the same comparison between Rump and an Internet retail giant in jokes about the fact that it took the president two days before he finally condemned racists without equating them with anti-rac-
ists. As Colbert commented, “Two days! Does he order his spine on Amazon Prime?” Sadly, Rump returned that order the very next day, when he ignited a firestorm — or stormtroopers’ fire — by doubling down on his initial, neo-Nazi-supporting response, equating, in an unhinged press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower, the nation’s real patriots (who see us all as being similarly human) with people (almost all of them male) who hate his daughter for marrying a Jew and converting to Judaism, hate his son-inlaw, Jared Kushner, for being a Jew, and of course hating his own grandchildren for being born Jewish. I’ve got to tip my yarmulke to you, Mr. President. Whadda guy.
Trump’s ear back for “his both sides are to blame” statement. “He missed an opportunity to be very explicit here,” said Graham said on “Fox News Sunday,” of all places. “These groups seem to believe they have a friend in Donald Trump in the White House. I don’t know why they believe that, but they don’t see me as a friend in the Senate, and I would urge the president to dissuade these groups that he’s their friend.” And this is how Charlottesville has become bigger than
the fl agrant visibility of neo-Nazi groups or the 19 hospitalized in the auto attack or even the tragic death of Heather Heyer. Will Americans come to think of the racists as Trump’s people, as his base? And will that make them uncomfortable being at the same party? Trump, no doubt at the insistence of his staff and family, tried to right the situation on Monday, only to backslide in unhinged fashion on Tuesday. He can read the right words, but when he speaks with his own voice he seems to
be saying, “Don’t do that,” while winking to the thugs that he enjoys their transgressions, their violence. His inability to make a clean break with the racists may be his undoing. Trump is letting himself be identified with the worst elements in American society. Meanwhile, the South Carolina senator spoke with a clarity that eludes the president. “Their cause is hate, it is un-American, they are domestic terrorists, and we need more from our president,” Graham said.
ling show in all this. Antin touches on our belief systems and how they are challenged, and looks at the randomness and irony in the singer, Rosie Penn, having her fate held in the hands of one man. The intriguing and tense scene at the end of the show when she is saved is the only truly dramatic moment in the piece — and the merest hint of what this show might have been. Alas, for “Lili Marlene,” it was too little and far too late.
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