Tynan's Anger

Dear Mr. Hitchens,

I was very pleased to have encountered your book Letters to a Young Contrarian. I was especially greatful to have encountered it this year, when I am 23, as opposed to 18, when it probably would have been the kind of book to change my life. No doubt, Mr. Hitchens, your views on being a contrarian are well formed by years of experience, dealing with both the social, political, and psychological pressures of being a contrarian. My question to you, Mr. Hitchens, is the following: why?

No doubt, there is significant value to being contrarian in many instances. If Mother Theresa has had some questionable, perhaps horrific political views or effects, it should be pointed out. Considering the social and political assumptions about Mother Theresa's immaculate reputation, it would probably be a full-time, all-consuming task for an individual. My question is this: do you think anyone would naturally want to be the guy who rails against Mother Theresa for a living? And would you want to be in the social company of the guy who rails against Mother Theresa for a living.

Nonetheless, I understand your motivation for doing so. The unspoken, but often forced silence against Mother Theresa's hardline views represents something of an injustice. In an ideal world, those actually effected by Mother Theresa's views, should be able to voice their concerns. While they mat lack the proper voice and advocacy to do so, is it really your job to speak for an entire people you otherwise have no connection to? In that case, doesn't it become less about social injustice and more about your professional reputation?

Nonetheless, your letters to a young contrarian provide an invaluable resource to understanding how contrarianism works when necessary. In particular, I appreciated your juxtaposition of Vaclav Havel's "as if" policy in an oppressive society with E.P. Thompson's "as if" principle in a free one. The fact that your letters were written and published right around 9/11 have only made the comparison more appropriate, and with less restraint than both you and Thompson displayed.

Nonetheless, Mr. Hitchens, not everyone has the luxury you do of being a professional contrarian. In most cases, people stand up for certain principles that they feel they need to be contrarian about. Being a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian is less of a social justice and more of a method of drawing personal attention (which you have accomplished with remarkable success this decade). Nonetheless, the fundamental problem is this: if a mistake is made in the perpetual search for contrarianism—as in, you take a contrarian view to a just policy-it can damage both the personal clout the contrarian has built. Most dangerously, it can lead to the replacement of a just policy with an oppressive-even if, as a proper contrarian, one looks for an unquestioned injustice.

The ultimate problem is this, Mr. Hitchens; not everyone can be a professional contrarian such as yourself. The reason may be less one of means (journalism, political freedoms, economic means, etc.), and more the fact that, as a contrarian, you are forced to speak for a group of people who want nothing to do with you. The fundamental problem is that contrarianism is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. Skepticism is always to be recommended, contrarianism just leads to personal rather than intellectual ends.

Sincerely,
X

Labels: angry young man, christopher hitchens, ep thompson, letters to a young contrarian, mother theresa, politics, radicals, Social justice, tynan's letters, vaclav havel

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Yesterday, I continued with the top 5 historical characters of the decade. Today, I will begin the countdown of the Best Original Characters, going from #10 to #6.

---

10. Laurence (Shining City, Conor MacPherson). Therapy is always an exceedingly dangerous area for playwrights to cover; it can so easily fall into a playwright's own self-absorption that most New York playwrights don't even bother trying. In the case of MacPherson's Dublin, however, the social stigma that afflicts therapy outside of New York City is still visibly present, and while the guilt-ridden Laurence admits his need for it, he feels the stigma as well. In MacPherson world, Laurence is the lynch pin between modern psychotherapy and the old Irish ghost story, where facing your personal demons can be as terrifying as facing demons straight out of hell. Laurence's unassuming ability to grasp this concept made him one of the most endearing characters we've seen all decade, and one who, in a perfect world, would be a role model for fighting psychotherapy's stigmatization outside the theater universe.


9. Matt (Red Light Winter, Adam Rapp) You won't find that many Angry Young Man in today's drama. You’re more likely to find plays like Red Light Winter, an excellent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work by Adam Rapp that outlines quite clearly the problems with the modern approach to masculinity. In previous generations, characters like Matt would be the ones raging against a corrupt social. After these playwrights were fooled once in the 60s, and fooled again in the 90s, dealing with a corrupt society has turned would-be culture warriors into neurotic messes. On the other hand we have Davis, Matt's megalomaniacal best friend who cheats on the wife he has pilfered from Matt, treats everyone he meets as an object. In previous generations, Davis would be stuffing Matt into a locker. Today, Matt envies Davis' style, but secretly abhors everything about the way he thinks. Matt is the most vivid portrayal as the modern young man theater has produced this decade; he's Jimmy Porter with a self-inflicted castration.


8. Eleanor (Rock 'n' Roll, Tom Stoppard). In Stoppard's vision of Cambridge and Prague in 1968, a world where politics, philosophy, music, history, and attitude all combine in one sordid mess, Eleanor is the smartest one in the room. She's cynical enough to know when she's being threatened ("Lenka, don’t try to shag my husband until I’m dead or I’ll stick The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance up your rancid cunt, there’s a dear.”), but also one most grounded in the basic thrust of humanity ("Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.") There were a handful of characters make me laugh and cry with a statement cut on a dime; Eleanor, dying of cancer, was the only one of those characters at peace with herself.


7. Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks). If August Wilson brought the African American experience its Death of a Salesman with Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks brought that world its American Buffalo and its True West in one play taking the Mamet world of con artistry and Shephard's brother-on-brother power struggle into an area no white playwright could bring it without resorting to stereotypes. With a sense of verbal rhythm on par with Mamet, a mysticism on par with Shephard, and a social conscious that may have even surpassed both, Parks connected the con to the culture of the present day, linked it to our nation's history (the brothers' names imply exactly what they are meant to imply), and, by my guess, the highly-coveted Universal Human Condition. By putting con artistry in both the real world its most basic theatrical form, Parks may have out-Mameted Mamet.


6. Katurian Katurian (The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh). Upon visiting Soviet Czechoslovakia, Philip Roth once said, "It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (a sentiment Tom Stoppard has echoed). In the nameless totalitarian regime Katurian lives in, it's easy to see why. Katurian doesn't write for personal fame; of his hundreds of stories, only one has been published. Nor does he write for a social cause; there's no current events within the Pillowman universe for him to fight against. Instead, Katurian writes simply because he has to; there's something inside his private world that brings his instinct as a writer out of him, even if it takes the form of deeply disturbing stories about murdering children. The only thing that matters to Katurian is that his work is preserved; it's more important than a book deal, his brother, or his own life. The last to be completed work of McDonagh's famed wave of creativity, all Katurian wanted was a voice in a world not inclined to give him one; it helped that he, like McDonagh, was a fantastic writer. In fact, in debating whether this list was worth it, or whether it was a kind of pointless waste of time, Katurian's plight was exactly what convinced me to go ahead with it. Katurian would have given up everything to have the kind of freedom a blog provides. Of course, if he did have it, there'd be no Pillowman.
   

Labels: adam rapp, angry young man, conor macpherson, Katurian, martin mcdonagh, red light winter, rock 'n' roll, shining city, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Pillowman, tom stoppard, Topdog/Underdog

You Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan's Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

---

• Mark Ravenhill, the Angry Gay Man of the '90s who once committed Tynan's Anger blasphemy by lambasting the Angry Young Men of the '50s, comes out with a pretty interesting argument against playwrights reading their plays aloud as good editing practice. Playwrights, Ravenhill says, understand dialogue better in their head, and reading it aloud makes dialogue sound worse than with an actor reading it. That is if you're a good playwright, but you don't have enough clout to have actors read it offhand, and you are as neurotic a reader as I am. I guess it makes sense, though it may just be Ravenhill's attempt to counter what every playwriting teacher teaches just cause he can. How provocative!
• Sarah Palin and McCain have started a disturbing trend by equating science funding with earmark spending. With McCain, this tend is probably just macho military hatred of nerds. But according to Slate, in Palin's case, it's a sign of her anti-intellectualism and Fundamentalist Christianity. While it still must seem ridiculous to the rest of the world that this approach has any legitimacy in the U.S., the good thing is that it seems to be on the way out. The evangelical/Fundamentalist Christian hatred of science, which just 4 years ago seemed like half the country, now seems like a smallish minority. Of course, as Richard Hofstadter would tell you, that should change back to anti-intellectualism in the next 20 years—maybe twice.
• Kenneth Turan is now the only full-time film critic at the Los Angeles Times. Carina Chocano announced that she was one of the staffers canned in the latest editorial purge. Now, at the major paper in the capital of the American film industry, there's only one full-time critic and a bunch of freelancers. True, the L.A. Times has got perhaps America's best critic in Turan, but this is a depressing development all the same.
• Tracy Morgan is a human roller coaster, but it's worth it for the material he produces on 30 Rock. At this point, all Morgan has to say is "Liz Lemon" and I'll burst out laughing. Other than the schmaltzy ending, my only major complaint about Thursday's 30 Rock premiere was that they didn't find more time for the Tracy and his porn video game subplot. The More Mozart/Salieri parallels, the better.
  
• Please, please, please, Sam Mendes, don't screw up Preacher. One of the best comic book series of the last 25 years, the one that got me into comic books in the first place, is finally hitting the big screen after a failed attempt at an HBO series. Mendes's Road to Perdition adaptation remains underrated, which particularly upsetting when you consider how ridiculously overrated American Beauty was. Preacher was a more comic book-y comic book than Perdition, so there's a lot of room for Mendes to either grow as a director or fail fantastically. But hey, it's less impossible of an adaptation than Watchman...
• The DMCA turned 10 years old this week. Everyone admits that the Clinton administration bill has shaped digital media to what it is today, just as everyone admits how infuriating and controversial the bill's details have been over the last 10 years. If I'm right, history will judge the DMCA to be as important as something like the GI Bill or the Homestead Act. Some day there will be an entire genre of a new arts media about the flame wars in the Old Web. Can Second Life be considered a 51st state?
  

Labels: 30 rock, angry young man, comic book movies, dmca, film criticism, los angeles times, mark ravenhill, preacher, sam mendes, science wars, tracey morgan

Here's an article I wrote in a moment of inspiration Saturday after reading about the Milton Friedman Institute Protests. This was deemed too hot for the Chicago Maroon!

---

I love the University of Chicago as much as any Simpsons-quoting, Durkheim-referencing nerd. One thing I do not miss about the U of C, however, is its hopeless self-absorption, thinly-veiled sense of elitism, and unrepentant collective narcissism when it comes to political protest. Over my 4 years at the U of C, I saw a lot of protests that involved U of C policy. I saw virtually none that involved the world outside of Hyde Park. What made it all the more frustrating was that some of the world’s major issues were filtered into protests that made the U of C into the Great Satan against social justice. If you had listened to STAND in the 2006-2007 school year, the U of C administration would be personally responsible for murdering innocent Sudanese (a joke that made it into the recent Fire Escape Film Carmen: The Movie). If you had listened to the Kick Coke off Campus protesters, you’d think providing Coke in Bartlett (to students who would have bought it at Walgreen’s otherwise) would make the University personally responsible for Colombian farmers starving to death. And now, if you listened to the Milton Friedman Institute protesters, you’d think the name of an economic institute in 2008 is personally responsible for electrocuting the testicles of Argentineans 30 years ago.

The problem is that the issues that actually matter to the lives of college students go virtually ignored. The protests for healthcare, which a significant portion of undergrads will go without once they graduate, were nearly unilaterally attended by 60-year-old men. There have been no major protests against government wiretapping at the same time the NSA has been probably ready and able to look at every Chicago student’s Facebook profile and emails. The War In Iraq, the darling of political protests before the war started in 2002/2003, went completely un-protested from 2004-2008 when I was there, mainly because it was too depressing to contemplate (and also because the U of C probably has a disproportionately low number of undergrads with a sibling or relative fighting in the war).

Along the way came some particularly ironic moments that symbolized the pathetic qualities of the University’s myopia. The protest against the Common Application drew 5 times the number of people who protested weeks later with STAND, symbolizing that U of C’ers place more value in fighting the way applicants fill out pieces of paper than they do in fighting genocide. The same anti-Common App protesters sold shirts saying “I Am Uncommon,” not realizing the irony of having hundreds of students walking around with identical shirts promoting their uniqueness. One of my personal favorites is the website urging the University of Chicago to Kick Coke Off Campus, which leaves the “Background Information” section on the reasoning behind the protest blank. And now, when the current economic climate means most undergrads will struggle to find jobs when they graduate (especially those who chose the U of C to become I-Bankers), the main economic issue drawing ire is naming an institute after a scholar who hasn’t been all that controversial in the past 20 years (unless you’re in the anthropology department). In reality, the brainpower that would occur behind that artificial name can only help the current economic crisis.

The University has a long tradition of being blind to external political issues unless they affected the U of C. Even the student riots of ’68 were only brought on after a radical sociology professor was denied tenure. After when the students took over the administration building, they still went to class. But what bothers me most is how easily distractible the U of C’s political conscience can be, and how in focusing to a ridiculous extent on the school’s own problems, students have largely overlooked the ones that affect the rest of the world, including those who live, you know, a few blocks away, west of Cottage Grove. These are supposedly the brightest intellectual minds in the country, the least gullible to taking any ideology verbatim, and who can use their intelligence to solve the world’s problems.

I’m not sure who can directly address the school’s political self-absorption—it’s too dangerous for Zimmer to address at this point. The main issue is that there’s not a strong enough infrastructure of political organization on campus to do it. What we see instead are certain lunatics who have the least shame (or to some, the most balls), to go all out and eventually dominate the schools political spectrum (and the Maroon’s coverage). It’s time to burst Hyde Park’s collective bubble, as scary and unpredictable as that may sound.

Links:
Faculty Convene Over Friedman (UChiBLOGo)
Tell the University of Chicago to Kick Coke off Campus! (Union Voice)
STAND requests student funds for refugee protest (Chicago Maroon)

Labels: angry young man, chicago maroon, politics, protesting, self-absorption, university of chicago

So far, my vote would go to the following couplet from TV on the Radio's "Dancing Choose":

Angry young mannequin/
American, apparently

It should be obvious why I like the first lyric. Buy it's the second lyric, a a subtle jab at American Apparel, that kills me. (I sounds like sounds like Tunde Adebimpe is saying it in the song, but the official lyric is lawsuit-free).

These five words reek with so much concentrated intelligence that I may need to put it in a bottle.

Labels: american apparel, angry young man, indie rock, intelligence, tv on the radio

Staging Ibsen presents one of the biggest conundrums for contemporary directors. Like Edgar Allen Poe, Rene Descartes, and even Bob Dylan, Ibsen suffers from the fate of many revolutionary artists and thinkers who see their breakthroughs grow stale in hindsight do the work of their followers. Ibsen’s fate in this regard is particularly pronounced; all modern dramatists can, arguably, be considered his followers. Contemporary stagings have a hard time making 19th century drawing room dramas with well-made-play tendencies seem truly modern.

In the case of the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s staging of An Enemy of the People, however, any hint of modernity is shed in favor of the farcical, childish, and just plain stupid. Using a nearly half-century-old translation of Ibsen featured in one of the standard published editions, it’s hard to convey anything modern - this is still a world of pocket watches, smoking hats, “Pah’s” and “egads.” By playing closer to the 18th than the 20th century side of the play, the Phoenix Ensemble has sapped Ibsen of his strengths and cut out any chance for an interesting production. Instead, they’ve created a watered down, supposedly more digestible version of An Enemy of the People, a play that fights against the very notion of watered-down convictions.

The Phoenix Ensemble has a focus on elementary school education, and I suspect that the group chose to focus on the more childish sides of the play in order to attract more kids. At the production I attended, however, the youngest audience members were at least well into high school. Even if the farcical side of the play may attract kids, this production's intentional, gaping sense of the pre-modern 19th century world will turn away as many children as it will draw in. Perhaps more damaging, however, would be how this play could actively turn away those just beyond elementary and facing a critical period in a theatergoer’s life. If a young teen, newly acquainted with skepticism, were to see this production after hearing of the play's purported importance, I fear he’d never become a regular theatergoer.

The irony of such a safe, facile production is that Ibsen’s text demands of its audience the exact opposite of a feeling of safety and ease. An Enemy of the People is about a righteous man who doggedly refuses to back down from his ethical righteousness in spite of every conceivable obstacle thrown his way. Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the character at the center of the play, is a man of science whose sense of right and wrong clashes with the political demands of his community. He fights to shut down the highly profitable but highly unsanitary town baths not because of any political bias, but simply because it is the right thing to do.

It’s that same unflinching sense of duty that induced Arthur Miller to adapt the work in the wake of McCarthyism. Ibsen had tapped into the spirit of "truthiness" over a hundred years before Colbert. The political parallels to the current era, be it stem cells, off-shore drilling, or what have you, are obvious, perhaps too much so. These parallels make the play vulnerable to staging by intellectually careless companies; it seems that the Phoenix Ensemble has followed through on that vulnerability.

At the center of Ibsen’s modern cynicism in An Enemy of the People is Dr. Stockmann’s attack on the stupidity of the solid majority of his town in Act IV, but in this production the speech has a very different impact than Ibsen intended. Anti-populism, expressed by a man beaten down by political reality, was not a new theme—Plato made the same point with his philosopher-kings—but it flew in the face of every common sentiment of Ibsen's time. No one, in the 1870s or today, has known how to deal with the conundrums Ibsen raised. Unfortunately, when you apply this argument to a New York setting, the connotation is of comfortable New York art patrons who look dismissively at people living anywhere else in the country (in Jesusland, as a popular internet map refers to every non-dark blue American state).

This bastardized elitism is not the only element of this Enemy of the State that violates Ibsen’s spirit. Rather than show any realism or nuance in the plays’ characters, the Phoenix Ensemble’s production features almost nothing but caricatures. Particularly vulnerable is Jospeh Menino’s Mayor Stockmann, who lies somewhere between the Grinch and Mr. Burns. He makes Lionel Barrymore’s realism as Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life seem like Marlon Brando’s. The other perpetrator is Michael Surabian’s Aslaksen, who might have driven me to violence if he had said the word “moderation” in that same intentionally pronounced manner one more time. If there’s any hope to be found, it’s in Kelli Holsopple as Dr. Stockmann’s fiery independent daughter Petra. Ms. Holsopple is the only actor who seems to understand that realism is the entire reason why Ibsen gets staged anymore.

With an already turgid translation that should have never been used for any staging after 1980, director Amy Wagner has her cast rush through the text without letting anything sink in (at two hours and 40 minutes, I’m sure the rushed delivery was intended to shorten the play to under three hours). Rushed, nearly inaudible delivery is bad enough with a contemporary play; it’s even worse when “egad” and “Pah” are not even close to the most antiquated terms used.

So while there are certainly political parallels to the present in The Enemy of the People, the most pressing parallels of the Phoenix Ensemble’s revival are to the contemporary state of theater itself. In an era when few companies will dare risk offending an audience and losing ticket and subscription sales, we’re seeing a lot more productions like this Enemy of the People. It's all too common that revivals of aggressive plays go against the originals' aggressive stance with populist, bumbling productions. To make Ibsen really relate to a modern audience, we need some brave soul to go crazy with the text, someone who is not afraid to distort Ibsen into something much newer. We also need a director who is willing to make sure there is not a pocket watch to be found. It seems no one else wants to take the risk of offending one’s contemporaries, so let me offer my uncensored, journalistically dangerous suggestion to the Phoenix Ensemble that, like Dr. Stockmann, spares no exclamation points: GROW SOME FUCKING BALLS!!!!!

---

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Amy Wagner; translated by Rolf Fjelde; set and lighting design by Maruti Evans; costume design by Suzanne Chesney; sound design by Elizabeth Rhodes (music composed by David Nelson). Photos by Gerry Goodstein.

Starring Laura Piquado (Mrs. Stockmann), Josh Tyson (Billing), Joseph J. Menino (Mayor Stockmann), Tom Escovar (Hovstad), John Lenartz (Dr. Stockmann), Brian A. Costello (Captain Horster), Kelli Holsopple (Petra Stockmann), Jack Tartaglia (Morten Stockmann), Dmitri Friedenberg (Eilif Stockmann), Angus Hepburn (Morten Kiil), and Michael Surabian (Aslaksen).

An Enemy of the People runs through September 20th at the Connelly Theater. It is performed by the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble.

This review was originally featured on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, an enemy of the people, angry young man, blogcritics, henrik ibsen, here's what's wrong with the world today., phoenix theatre ensemble

A New York Times feature by Mark Blankenship on Sunday talked about the declining role of the tough guy on the stage. As this blog's name should indicate, I believe that if anything, the American stage needs more tough guys and angry young men. As neutral as the article tried to be, it still welcomed the rise of the emasculated man in America drama. This antipathy towards masculinity has dangerous implications.

Here are some quotes that made me nervous:

“It’s about experiencing his conflicting emotions instead of driving forward to get something, which is what the leading man is usually doing,” Mr. Groff said, noting that Claude is ambivalent about both hippie ideals and the Vietnam War.

Galt MacDermot, “Hair’s” composer, said that when he and James Rado and Gerome Ragni, the librettists and lyricists, wrote the show, they were tired of men always having to be cowboys. “Men are what they are,” he said. “And like anyone else they need the freedom to express that.”

What exactly, are men? Are they just conflicted, wavering, or—dare I say it—complacent? Or are they more assertive, pushy, refusing to concede a point? How has the decline of these values been due to the post-women's lib confusion of this attitude with misogyny and brutishness? That may be an unpopular view of masculinity, and the article vaguely alluded to the "blue state-red state mentality" as part of the fear of approaching true masculinity. But how do conventions get challenged, how does intellectual progress persist, without aggressive, free-thinking males not afraid to take a stance, whether or not it falls out of favor?

Here's a passage that upset me more, regarding the Billy Elliot musical:

Mr. Hall said that Billy embodies the “frustrated creativity” of men who are raised to be tough but that the character is also an economic symbol. In countries like Britain and the United States, he said, products offered to consumers are being made elsewhere. “You’re changing from a society of making things to a more service-oriented and entertainment-oriented society,” he continued. “And that requires skills that are more often thought of as feminine or soft. All the value of being a hard guy means nothing now. Billy’s community has to embrace him, Mr. Hall said, “because the men are going to have to become like Billy if they want to survive.”

What does he mean by becoming like Billy? Is creative expression a method of escaping social injustice? Is it a method of apathy? Does Billy's dancing solve the labor crisis? There are ways of expressing social frustration in a creative manner, and if Billy was a true artist, ballet would be part of the solution rather than simply a means of escaping the problem. However much that has to do with the femininity of his chosen art is irrelevant.

Matt Wolf at The Guardian says this has been the case for over 50 years, and we shouldn't complain anymore. I say the fact we haven't complained is precisely the point.

Labels: angry young man, billy elliot, broadway, hair, marlon brando, masculinity, tough guys

So after years of loudly and obnoxiously bashing Harold Pinter to anyone who cared (or to people who didn't) I'm finally starting to see the error of my ways. University Theater here at the U of C did a fantastic rendition of The Homecoming, convincing enough that I'm tempted to see it again on Broadway. My bias towards Pinter largely comes from my father (if you've ever seen The Squid and the Whale, a lot of my opinions come from the same vein as arguing that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens), and the fact that my the first Pinter play I ever saw was his first, The Room, which, while mirroring the chronology of the theater world's introduction to Pinter, is not exactly an easy introduction to a playwright for a 17 year old.

Probably another factor was that I was exposed to David Mamet at roughly the same time as Pinter. While both playwrights tend to use dialog as a weapon, Mamet is much more grounded in reality and easier to digest, and hence I naturally felt the assert Mamet's superiority in the theater of menace. Now, of course, with four years of college in me, I can come up with more sources of comparison. I see the parallels to Beckett, Ionesco, and the Angry Young Man movement. I see more apt American parallels than Mamet, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, in my mind, is Pinter with a Midwestern accent). I can even see parallels with the more comical but still emotionally jarring playwrights like Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. I still think Philip Roth deserves a Nobel Prize more, but I am less inclined to dismiss Pinter's Noble Prize outright. I also now really want to see Sleuth, and am frustrated that I don't have it On Demand in my apartment.

Labels: angry young man, david mamet, edward albee, eugene ionseco, harold pintet, joe orton, philip roth, sam shepard, samuel beckett, sleuth, the homecoming, tom stoppard