Monday, October 20, 2008
OLEANNA is a right-wing play - glad the NYTimes agrees
A few years ago I wrote an essay about OLEANNA called History is Written by the Winners in which I suggest that there was a deeply conservative, even misogynist subtext to the play. Although some feminists were also saying it, for most people it was just some sort of he-said/she-said both-sides-are-wrong kind of thing.
FINALLY the NYTimes - the "paper of record" lays it on the line. In its caption of the photo on the left it says: "David Mamet's OLEANNA addresses sexual harassment through a conservative lens."
Thank you for noticing. Of course it probably helps that Mamet recently came out of the closet as a conservative.
The rest of the article frets about the lack of conservative views in the theatre. But that's wrong - the author, Patricia Heffernan, is just not thinking fourth -dimensionally, as Doc Brown says. The theatre is FULL of conservative views - anything written 50 years ago represents conservative views, or at the very least respresents a world that is pallatable to conservatives. Except most stuff by G. B. Shaw.
Posted by
Nancy