Archives for April 6, 2004

“The three hurried downstairs, to find, not the gay dog they expected, but a young man, colourless, toneless, who had already the mournful eyes above a drooping moustache that are so common in London, and that haunt some streets of the city like accusing presences. One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. She knew this type very well–the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books. She knew the very tones in which he would address her. She was only unprepared for an example of her own visiting-card.”

E.M. Forster, Howards End

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 clich