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