I’m back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee’s Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.
I loved the Lucas play, though I didn’t expect to:
The good news is that Craig Lucas’ characters never act like puppets on a better writer’s string, nor is “Small Tragedy” a parasitical “commentary” on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability–one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his na