My kewl new screenplay

THE CASSANDRA DIRECTIVE

by N. G. McClernan

EXT DESERT PLANET

This is an angry planet. OK maybe not an angry planet, but at least a somewhat disgruntled planet. But it has a lot of rocks and shit and that's kewl.

We see PUP, a retarded slob of a foot soldier who would be great comic relief except that he is also evil. A very good actor, maybe even a Shakespearean-quality actor should be wasted on cast in this role. He is dressed like a cowboy.

FROM HIS POV
We see a small silver spaceship land in the distance.

PUP
Whuuus that?

We hear LT. MANLY

MANLY
You're an idiot, Pup.

We see Manly and Pup from a middle distance. Manly is attractive, in a gruff manly damaged way, but not so attractive that he causes homoerotic panic in the target audience. He is dressed like a cross between a cowboy and a pirate.

ON the screen, her back to us, walks CASSANDRA, a beautiful woman, very thin except for her gigantic breasts. She is naked, but at first glance it looks like she's wearing a shiny black skin-tight jump suit because she has black shiny latext spray-painted over her body.

FROM HER POV
We see Manly smirking and Pup drooling. But then, he drools alot. His face breaks into a stupid lustful grin. Manly crosses his arms, wary.

MANLY

Can I help you Miss?

Cassandra speaks in a monotone and is completely incapable, as are all robots and aliens, of using contractions. The English language is beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated robots and aliens.

CASSANDRA

We will have sex. In the future.

MANLY

Come again?

PUP

Huhhuhhuh! She sayed yer gonna have sex!

MANLY

Pup, you're an idiot.

CASSANDRA

You do not believe me. That is the standard response from you huma - error 432 - from you boys.

MANLY

Why would I want to have sex with you?

PUP

Yew kin have sex wid me!

MANLY

Pup, you're an idiot. She's a robot. Cordoba class. Fully automatic with fine Corinthian leather, manufactured in the Terran city known as Newark.

PUP

No she ain't. She's a pretty lady!

MANLY

She can't use contractions.

PUP

She cain't use whuuut?

MANLY

Contractions! Didn't you hear her? Instead of "you don't believe me" she said "you do not believe me."

PUP

But that's the same thing. I don get it.

MANLY

You idiot. Don't is a contraction. She can't say it. Watch.

to Cassandra

Say "don't"

CASSANDRA

Do not.

MANLY

I said "don't." Say "don't"

CASSANDRA

Next you will say "Pup, you are an idiot."

PUP

She ain't gonna say it now. Yew jus told her 'dont say dont' - Ah hurd yuh.

MANLY

Pup, you're an idiot.

Manly and Pup look at each other in amazement.

PUP

How - how did she knew you wuz gonna say that?

MANLY

Why are you such an idiot?

to Cassandra

What could make you think I would fuck a hunk of junk like you?

CASSANDRA

I remind you of your dead wife.

MANLY

I don't have a dead wife.

CASSANDRA

You will tell me you have a dead wife. At some point in the future.

MANLY

I don't believe you.

Cassandra looks at Pup

CASSANDRA

And you will be killed by a nest of vipers. Mutant vipers.

PUP

Ah don' buhleeve that! Dey ain't no vipers, mutant or no nuther kind on this here disgruntled planet!

CASSANDRA

There will be when it becomes narratively convenient.

PUP

Whuuuu?

CASSANDRA

Now my master - error 786 - professor will come to this place and tell you that I am dangerous.

MANLY

I don't believe you.

In a moment, THE PROFESSOR appears.

PROFESSOR

Stay away from her! She's dangerous!

To be continued...

How many of you are sentient?

I think Andrew Bellware is not a very good director. I even wrote a brief parody of his movie Angry Planet, so it's no surprise that I think his movie Earthkiller, available for free online here, is also not very good.

But don't listen to me. There is scathing commentary, some of it just for the trailer alone, online. Some of it is pretty funny:

Looks like a german porn intro

---

lol this is that kind of movie that you're suppose to watch while you're high, haha.

---

That was 46 seconds of my life I could have used on better things like getting my teeth pulled out.. I know not everyone can't have wast amounts of money to make movies for but there is no excuse for when already the trailer shows how bad the acting is...

---

made in 1970's(looks like)

---

Miles above earth.....there are women are running around in miniskirts

---

And on and on. I also found this somewhat lengthier review of Earthkiller at imdb.com - this person seems to have watched the entire movie:

Earthkiller is one of those movies where afterwards you have two questions. The first is "What is it" and the second is "why did I bother watching it?" It was bad. The sets were fake and the acting and script was far worse. The CGI looked like a video game and the non-CGI effects were far worse. Usually you want a movie like this to stop tossing so much ketchup around. This one didn't have the money in their budget to use real ketchup...

I haven't read the script before Bellware got his hands on it, so it's possible it's much better than the final product. I suspect there was much more dialog in the original script because what's in the movie would fill about maybe fifteen pages - ten if you take out the "fucks" - and five of the pages left are spoken by a single actor, in the mystery-solving portion of the movie.

But I really must object to the criticisms of the acting - I can't speak for most of the actors, but I paid two of the actors in this movie, Nat Cassidy and Greg Oliver Bodine, to perform in plays of mine - Bodine in two different plays. And their acting was quite good.

Cassidy doesn't get to do much in Earthkiller besides insult the other space cadets (or whatever all the people with guns are supposed to be.) But bitchy people with guns is standard in Bellware's movies. In fact there are rarely more than three emotional states in Bellware's movies from what I've seen: surly, fearful and android.

So Cassidy doesn't do much in this movie, besides being surly, but he doesn't have anything to be ashamed of - other than agreeing to perform in a Pandora Machine movie.

Bodine on the other hand, does get a chance to do well. It helps that his character, Schroeder, gets half the entire dialog in the movie, since he delivers the exposition which solves the mystery of who the amnesiac android lady is and who the bad guy is.

And in fact, this an improvement over the matching scene in Angry Planet, in which Bodine's character also solves the mystery of the movie. The Earthkiller scene works better because Schroeder isn't an idiot, as the character in Angry Planet was, and Bodine even underplays the surliness in Earthkiller, considering that he's been mortally wounded by the space zombies haunting the spaceship and his primary goal in life when we meet him is to die before he also turns into a space zombie.

And you know that he will beg the fembot to kill him because people are always asking to be killed in this movie - or justifying why they have to kill somebody. Because otherwise they'll turn into killer zombies. Much of the plot of this movie is murky, but that particular point is made crystal clear thanks to incessant reiteration.

But you almost care that Bodine's character suffers and dies, because unlike every other character in the movie, his Schroeder has an inner life. He gets to display a variety of emotions - resignation, contempt, despair, and we even see him in a flashback as a competent, obedient soldier. It all goes by very quickly because the main purpose of his scene is to explain who in the hell is the manic pixie psychotic, played by David Ian Lee, and why he suddenly shows up 3/4 of the way through the movie. The fact that Bodine is able to convey a sense of a three-dimensional human in the very brief time he's given is a testament to his acting abilities. Which is why I used him in two productions of mine. If the acting in this movie is considered bad, it's not the fault of at least two of the actors in the movie.

If it wasn't for the random yet frequent death, this movie would be like an episode of Scooby Doo, with a gang of young people running around hunting and being hunted by mysterious, super-natural-seeming monsters. And if Bellware had any sense at all, he would have played up the humorous aspects of the scenario - although it's quite possible that surly insults are his idea of humor.

But I would suggest that Pandora Machine movies lack more than humor - they lack humanity. The spectacle of a bunch of surly people, about whom we know nothing, running around with guns, insulting each other and then getting killed is a kind of emotion-deadening assembly line. Characters are interchangeable, soul-less meat puppets

A very perceptive critic once noted that the main reason why the first three released Star Wars movies were any good was thanks to Harrison Ford. The Star Wars movies without Ford (episodes 1 - 3) lack the humor and fun of episodes 4 - 6 and that's because there's no character like Han Solo, and no actor with the charisma to pull off a Han Solo. Without Han Solo/Harrison Ford, Star Wars becomes way too much about midi-chlorians and virgin births and bureacracy.

I doubt he realizes it, but Bellware actually has an actor who could be his very own Harrison Ford. Although Bodine does a good job, an actor who stands out even more in this movie is Tom Rowen, who plays one of the interchangeable space cadets. He is given much less to work with than Bodine, but his personality and charisma come through in spite of that. He dominates every scene he is in, no matter what tired factory-issue dialog he's made to say. He's a natural-born movie actor.

If Bellware was smart, he'd give Rowen a Han Solo-like role and build the movie around that character. By which I mean to say, it will never happen.

I hear you gots operational lady parts

Matt DeCapua as the
Space Cowboy from
JULIA & BUDDY
photo by Linda Jaquez

You never know what the audience is going to laugh at when you write a play. If you write a romantic comedy, you have to hope you can predict when at least some lines get a laugh.

In my JULIA & BUDDY this never failed to get a laugh:

    BUDDY
Hey, do you want to play dress-up? I could be the cowboy and you could be the Indian girl. 

    JULIA
And then what, you give me smallpox and steal my land?

No matter how quiet the audience was, this exchange, at least, would make them laugh.

And the best part is, it is 100% politically correct.

However, another politically correct line that I thought would get a laugh: "If you ruled out every Great Man in history on the basis of misogyny, you wouldn't have any left" only got one really solid laugh during our 5-show run.

Sometimes the actors will make a line funny. In the second half of the play, Julia has a panic attack, by herself, while she's on a boat. A little later Buddy joins her and observes that the weather and water are so beautiful nobody could have a panic attack in such an environment. To which Julia replies: "almost nobody." For several performances that got a good laugh, and I had never expected it, and mostly actor Claire Warden gets the credit for it.

And Matt DeCapua's Schopenhauer got sterner with each performance and so naturally became funnier, until by the last performance, one of the biggest laughs we got was this:

     JULIA
And he has a good sense of humor and sometimes he is so sweet and kind. But then again... he has brain damage. Mild brain damage. But still...  

    SCHOPENHAUER
A brain-damaged actor. If you are serious about philosophy you will dispense with him immediately.  

     JULIA
But I was so lonely before he came into my life.   

     SCHOPENHAUER
I recommend you get a poodle.  

     JULIA
Is that all there is to life? Poodles?  

     SCHOPENHAUER
Life is misery…

That's where the laugh was - after Schopenhauer says "life is misery." There's actually quite a bit of monologue after that, but Matt began to take longer pauses after "misery" for each performance, until by the last one it got a good hearty sustained laugh, which was immensely gratifying and still quite surprising, considering what he's actually saying.

I was disappointed that the Space Cowboy scene didn't get more laughs - the dialog is just so absurd I thought, surely... but after talking to my brother-in-law, who came with my sister to see the show, I think the reason it doesn't get a laugh is because the audience is perplexed as to what is going on. It is explained in the next scene why we see Buddy playing a Space Cowboy, but there is no exposition prior to the scene. So the audience was probably too confused to laugh.

Well I laughed every time he said "operational lady parts." Although it might be because I know the provenance of the phrase.

Habits of highly exploitive people 2

Andrew Bellware is concerned that I didn't mention him by name when I pointed out how he exploited actors - one of his calls for actors even ended up in "Nudity Required, No Pay" a blog I've been following for awhile.

Here's a website/blog I've linked to before (you'll remember, she's the "nest of vipers" blogger). Nancy McClernan has been writing/snarking about me specifically in some of her blog posts and yet she doesn't use my name so I didn't find out 'till just now. Dammit!

So in this post I certainly hope I've remedied the situation to his satisfaction.

I never paid attention to Andrew Bellware until Feb. 2009 when he decided to post a link to my blog, complaining because I said something unflattering about Manhattan Theatre Source there. The irony of this escapes him, utterly - he says something nasty about Manhattan Theatre Source once a month. Apparently only he is allowed to criticize MTS.

It's funny that he didn't discover my parody of his movie "Angry Planet" for over a year after I posted it to my blog (in response to his attacking me in the first place), considering that some of his friends (looking at you NC) monitored my blog through most of 2009. Why didn't they mention it to him?

Bellware posted my parody in its entirety to his own blog, without my permission, because he's as clueless as he is shameless - but when you live in a world where people work for you for free I guess you really develop a hearty disrespect for everybody else's creative work.

I emailed him to point out he did not have my permission - he then published my email address along with my email, and wrote:

Ooh! Legal consequences! Well I'll truncate the boring parts where it repeats itself anyway, that'll reduce the tl;dr part of our lives on the blog.

Repeats itself - yes because I was parodying your film. I guess the concept of "parody" escapes him.

In response to my email he "truncated" the parody - so of course the parody is reduced in effect - which I presume is what he wants. The parody is not very long in the first place - it gets in, makes its point and gets out. But as I said - no respect for other people's work.

It's amusing that he makes a point of saying what a waste of time my commentary/parody is, while he's obsessing over it.

And he can't figure out how to find the individual number of a blogger post and actually whined to me in his response to my email that I didn't provide it to make linking easier.

Like most exploiters, Bellware tries to make the issue about "prurience" - that is a favorite defense of the poor-Roman Polanski brigade. People were out to get Polanski because they HATE TEH SEX! Those puritanical Americans! As if Polanski did not drug and rape a 13-year old and then scamper off.

It's not about nudity, it's about not paying actors for nudity. Only an idiot - or someone being willfully obtuse - could fail to get that.

I do worry that if people see my parody they will want to see his movie, the way people like to see The Room, the famously bad movie.

And "Angry Planet" really is bad. It's not the actors' fault - many of them are very good in spite of the nonsensical script. And Bellware, I already explained just one facet of why your movie sucks - back in May 2009 - your "friends" seem to have let you down again.

I see that the posts on his blog, right after his attack on me, are all defensive about the fact that he doesn't pay actors - they get "points" - the film world's version of stock options instead apparently. But clearly my criticisms are having some effect - so all you actors who've donated your time and talent to his movies: if you ever see a dime, you'll probably have me to thank, at least in part.

UPDATE: Bellware's internet buddies are as clueless as he is. One of them writes in the comments:

legal consequences!?! that is five kinds of special, she reserves the right to mock and snipe at endless length and you are the target of her vitriol.

He either doesn't know, or doesn't care that:

Bellware attacked me, publicly, first in 2009.

A parody is free speech.

A creative work - which includes parodies - is property belonging to the author. There are laws about using people's work without their permission. Bellware is either unaware of this, or doesn't give a damn.

Bellware posted an annoucement offering to "hire" an actress to perform nude for no pay - this ended up on a blog that specializes in highlighting actor exploitation, specifically the exploitation of actresses who are constantly being asked to perform nude for no pay. Only a creep would make such an offer - and he's still a creep even if there are actresses desperate enough to agree to such working conditions.

It is my First Amendment right to express my opinion of Bellware's actions - and Bellware has certainly availed himself of such a right - first.

Bellware is not the only director who expects actors to work for free - the exploitation of actors in NYC is rampant. And these are the same people who throw gigantic hissy fits - as Bellware has done - if ANYBODY suggests that they might have some ethical failings. I suppose they don't get much pushback in their privileged existences, normally, and any they do get is absolutely shocking.

But if Lindsay Stewart really wants a sonnet, I can oblige - although I already have a limerick in mind, ready to go.

****

I do owe Bellware a little - thanks to the increase in web traffic he's sent my way, I'm making money through link clicks.

you can completely exploit actors - but SOMETIMES you have to pay writers

The Exploitation King on paying the talent:

Now remembering that I'm a producer and that my standard response to people wanting more money is that "You'll work for two dollars a day and a kick in the pants"

He's only talking about writers here - for him to discuss paying actors MORE money he'd have to be paying them any money in the first place.

And based on what I've seen of his movies, the awful irony is that the actors he's worked with are much better than the writers.

I found this extremely amusing as well:

I just spent the whole day making a 12-minute reel of nudity in Pandora Machine films. The Queen of Mars wanted it so she would have something to show to actors who are auditioning for roles which have nudity.

It's pretty tame stuff really. Contractually we're obligated to be able to get an R-rating or lower. But I'm happy with the love scenes in Angry Planet.

The funny thing I discovered is that because we tend to have creepy love scenes we tend to reach for the same piece of music I wrote for the love scene in the movie Pandora Machine. It's a tad comical when you string all the love scenes together and we're using the same lovecreepy music in them.

Why am I not surprised that their "love" scenes are uniformly creepy? But apparently they are "pretty tame." Well, I realize things have changed alot thanks to the Internet - but is it actually possible to get actors to do PORN for NO PAY now? If it wasn't for the damn R restriction my guess is he'd have already investigated that potential avenue of exploitation, very thoroughly.

I've already expressed my thoughts on love and "Angry Planet" (scroll to Feb 18)

When he isn't doing his best to alienate actors and writers, he likes to alienate people at Manhattan Theater Source. Now that's just silly.

more reviews of the Pandora Machine ouevre

Now admittedly grade B sci-fi is not a genre I'm interested in anyway. When it comes to science fiction movies I like the quality stuff like Alien or Starman, although what I really love is time-travel movies like Time After Time (Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells) and the Back to the Future trilogy. Which are more fantasy than science, but they tend to at least try to have scientific explanations for everything. And what those movies all have in common are fully realized characters and tightly crafted plots.

My absolutely favorite science-type movie though is Apollo 13 - science fact. But like the good sci-fi movies it has vivid characters and an extremely well-crafted story.

And then there's the stuff from Pandora Machine. The only movie I've seen by them is Angry Planet, and I thought it was bad. But then, I thought it was bad when I read the screenplay, way back when a former friend told me he was in it and I was trying my best to like it for his sake - I mean really trying. But I had to give that up - it was poorly plotted and the characters were strictly cardboard. And I thought the character he was playing was just awful - both evil and retarded and he seemed to exist mainly to give the other characters a chance to be verbally abusive - which made them even more unlikeable than they already were. Although he did take a quick break from being retarded to solve the movie's big plot mystery. I blogged about that in May 2009 - How Not to Write a Screenplay.

I felt embarrassed for my friend's sake - and also indignant - I thought he was too good an actor to play such a lame character. But when I asked him about his role once, and he avoided the question, I thought it was best not to mention it again.

But I haven't found a review yet of Angry Planet. I don't know what people who love grade-B sci-fi would think of it. Those kind of people generally do NOT seem to like Pandora Machine's other output though. I posted one review of Clonehunter on Friday - written not by a "professional" web reviewer, just a consumer who watched the movie. Here's the other one:

Worse than worst, 26 October 2010
1/10
Author: gj_r from Netherlands

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I never wrote a review before, but this movie sent me over the edge. Especially if they use WIRED telephones in the 26th century. So here's the deal.

The clone hunter is a middle-aged boring man that loses every fight he's getting himself into. His partner is a fine looking young woman who gets outsmarted by a 10 year old, gets drunk in a bar without noticing she gets the booze on purpose, gets her memory almost erased, and dresses like a Barbie doll in the second half of the movie.

The painfully embarrassing 3rd crew member aboard their spaceship is a holographic cat, that can pilot the ship if necessary. What were they thinking?? And that meowing bugger almost looks as good as a lost ghost from the good old Atari Pac-Man game. Need I write more ? The bad guys are as awfully visible as the "special effects".

Finally, all the action you'll get is you grabbing your remote control pressing the rewind or replay button, thinking "what the hell did I just miss?" The average episode of Blakes Seven or Star Trek was done better.

Or think about watching paint dry....

The reviewer is from The Netherlands and while his English is good - much better than my Dutch - I enjoyed this review in part because of the slightly-off grammar: "The bad guys are as awfully visible as the "special effects." Which I guess means that the bad guys looked as bad as the special effects?

I do love this sentence though: "The clone hunter is a middle-aged boring man that loses every fight he's getting himself into." Both for the phrase "middle-aged boring man" and also the Germanic-sounding "every fight he's getting himself into."

So this is a pretty bad track record - two out of two reviews that are not just negative but scathing.

It doesn't seem to bother Andrew Bellware at all, however - he seems to think that any attention is good. Which I guess is why he harasses me with nasty little messages delivered via search-engine text strings. He sent me another one today at 10 AM.

The harassment seems to spring from the fact that I blogged about his work - and his casting habits - and said I didn't like either. So I'm wondering if he harasses others who say online they don't like his work. Maybe he's decided to try the same marketing technique as that DecoreMyEyes guy in Brooklyn who pushes his web presence up through hostility to customers.

Bitter Gertrude

I was aware of the blogger called Bitter Gertrude awhile ago because I thought this post was bullshit - I haven't seen anything like what she claims in submissions to the various NYCPlaywrights calls for scripts. And anybody who knows the work of Neil Simon realizes that the reactive main character that she decided is exclusively a female failing in fact is not.

But an actor friend pointed me to the blog again and I generally agree with BG and she includes many a pro-feminist rant which of course I love.

In general BG is a much more tolerant person than I am when it comes to dealing with social media assholes. I know this because in this post she admits to having a discussion with someone she knows about the ghastly thing he posted to Facebook:

During the event, he posted a picture of a beautiful Black woman– surely another parent or relative (because who else goes to school plays?)– in a fit-and-flare leopard print dress with short sleeves, a modest neckline, and a hem that hits just above the knee. She was also wearing boots and a vintage-inspired updo. It was a secretly taken picture. She is smiling. She looks beautiful.
His comment on the picture was that her outfit is not appropriate for a “jr high play (sic),” but more appropriate for a club “or, better yet, a street corner.” He secretly took a picture of another parent at a school event, posted it online, and called her a whore. The wind was just . . . knocked out of me.
Several people called him out. The first few posts were all curious, on the order of “What? That outfit looks fine to me,” or “Why?” Mine was a little more detailed. I agreed with the other commenters that there was nothing wrong with the outfit, and that I’ve taught in similar outfits, although animal prints are not my personal style. I told him that it’s never appropriate behavior to post a secretly taken picture of a woman–a fellow parent at a school event!– that includes her face and calls her a whore, no matter what your opinion is of her outfit.
He reacted angrily. He said that my comments were “subtext crap” and refused to admit that his behavior was inappropriate in any way. He told me I needed to stop being “every females champion (sic).” He told me “If you don’t like it, that’s not my problem.” He told me, “I’m not apologizing for voicing my opinion.” He told me “I’m not going to sit here and have you ridicule me for voicing my opinion.” (Of course I wasn’t actually ridiculing him in any way, merely stating the things I’ve posted above.) He told me, “I thought you were a better friend than that.”

I kept thinking: why didn't you just block him? I mean seriously this is a hard-core asshole. She keeps insisting she wasn't ridiculing him. Well maybe that's the problem - he needs to be ridiculed because he's an asshole.

And then this well-justified complaint about Lena Dunham's just-a-little-girl-with-podiatry-issues photo, which demonstrates BG has another asshole friend on social media who needs a good blocking:

In the facebook discussion leading up to this post, I was told by an older man that my “style of criticism” was “over the top.” Whenever women speak out, whenever women claim our own power, whenever women voice an opinion without a meek “Well, it’s just my opinion,” someone is there to tell us we’re wrong for it. Often, we do it ourselves. This training runs deep.

It's possible that some of my Facebook friends hold such beliefs about my "style of criticism" and just know enough not to say anything. 

Certainly there is a social price to pay for a woman daring to criticize, as many women find out. My own personal experience includes criticizing bad independent movie director Andrew Bellware's exploitive casting practices - in return he - with the full approval of his gang of theater buddies (male and female) - attacked me personally, libeled me, and subjected me to months of search-string obscenities. 

None of Bellware's theater friends, as far as I have ever been able to discern, has a problem with his activities. Seriously - if you look at his Facebook profile he has lots and lots of buddies in the New York theater scene who think he's just swell. And I mean, Bellware is becoming famous as a bad movie maker. You really have to wonder what's in it for these NYC theater people to publicly support such a creep.

Although my interactions with Bellware haven't been completely negative  - his movie Angry Planet inspired the "space cowboy" mentioned in the publicity for JULIA & BUDDY. And this parody, which I admit, still cracks me up.

Now I'm intrigued

I thought I was the only person in the NY Theatre scene who was good and sick of the macho manly-man angry white man "brutal" playwrights so beloved of NY theatre critics, but I'm intrigued to see that Sheila Callaghan may be on the same wavelength, if this review in the NYTimes is any indication:

"That Pretty Pretty" takes aim at the many debased ways women are represented onstage and on screen. Ms. Callaghan has said she was inspired by a 2005 article in The New York Times about plays in which men behave badly.

(That article concludes, typically, that hey, that's just how guys are and if you don't like it you're uptight and PC and can't face the reality of glorious manliness, maaaaaan. But then I've long maintained that the NYTimes is a leading promoter of evolutionary psychology.)

Along with Ms. Fonda, the main characters are Agnes (Lisa Joyce) and Valerie (Danielle Slavick), bloodthirsty ex-strippers on a killing spree who are about as demure, complex and dignified as dancers in a Mötley Crüe video. They love random sex, skimpy clothes and Jell-O wrestling.

Agnes is performed with a ferocious, almost maniacal, flirtatiousness by Ms. Joyce, who, in Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter,” played just the kind of underdeveloped female character that this play mocks. She worships Howard Stern and dreams of breast enlargement, while Valerie likes to be beat up.

And the critics DO love the macho manly playwrights because they are so macho and manly and brutal. I said so a few years ago in my essay The Last Manly Man Playwright - the male critics really WANT the Rapp-type manly playwrights to succeed, and here is more proof in this review of Rapp's RED LIGHT WINTER from the Times - even though his work disappoints them again and again, they keep crowing about how promising he is (emphasis mine):

Mr. Rapp's desire to evoke an aching romanticism to match the barroom balladry of Tom Waits, which plays a small role in the play, ultimately dooms his better efforts to explore the desperate quality of young love with more complex insight. The claustrophobic atmosphere of "Red Light Winter" is gradually suffused with too many stale ideas about the cruel ironies and sometimes savage realities of romantic attraction. Mr. Rapp is a playwright of obvious promise and carefully honed gifts, and it's a hopeful sign that his writing continues to mature. Now he just needs to find something truly new or truly meaningful to say.

Rapp clearly is a total conservative when it comes to gender, with his macho men and his prostitute sexbots. So much so that it actually took me years to fully grasp the underlying, deep-seated misogyny. I saw Rapp interviewed on Theatre Talk when RED LIGHT WINTER was first produced and he and host Susan Haskins agreed that in hiring a prostitute, the sad sack character in RED LIGHT WINTER was getting an ego boost. This struck me as an extremely odd thing to say - from my perspective, resorting to hiring someone for sex is the opposite of self-esteem: you are forced to pay for somebody to touch you. I've been turning this conundrum over in my head for three years now, and only recently did it finally occur to me - this attitude comes from the mindset of extreme patriarchy. The reason that it's good for a man's self-esteem to hire a prostitute is because it re-inforces his standing in the pecking order. That any man is better than any woman because any man can always buy a woman. It reinforces his self esteem as a ruler over women and the traditional order of things.

That Susan Haskins apparently got this makes me wonder about her. I actually emailed her after the interview aired and asked her why she had said what she did, but she never got back to me.

But that's the mindset of the macho manly-man playwrights and their many many promoters and admirers. They're just too PC to come about and bluntly state exactly what they think about the relative worth of men vs. women on this planet, but the subtext is in all their work (macho playwrights AND macho-loving critics) for anybody who tunes into it.

Mac Wellman wants to slap the audience in the face

Almost five years ago I noted that Mac Wellman likes to talk about how much most American theater sucks, but he refrained from naming names - although the interviewer of this American Theatre piece claims otherwise, but this is the first time I have ever seen it:

(Wellman) ...I never wanted to write the American kind of “play.” Some of my plays are disguised—they have five legs instead of four legs. Some of them have tusks. 

(Interviewer) Oh, I know your plays are multi-limbed! 

Careful! 

When you say you’re not interested in writing the American play—what does that mean to you? 

Ooh, I wouldn’t want to list all the plays that I hate! I mean, I’m not a big fan of Arthur Miller or even Eugene O’Neill, though I think he knew a lot about theatre. O’Neill is a great person but you put him next to Strindberg and he disappears. I don’t particularly care for Tennessee Williams. I think, really, American playwriting began to get interesting in the ’60s with Shepard and Fornes. Before that, it’s screenplays that are great. 

I actually think the great period of playwriting is now. The problem is there just aren’t enough theatres willing to do plays. As well you know. 

Aye. 

In New York everything has to make money and be corporate. So it’s hard. But it continually evolves, so I don’t know where it will be in 10 years. 

Looking back at your texts and essays, you never seemed afraid to name names, as in your disinterest in Edward Albee, O’Neill. 

I mean, I like Albee. He likes to think he’s like Beckett, but he’s not like Beckett at all. You can’t imitate Beckett but you can imitate Albee and a million people have, and they aren’t as smart or interesting as he is—it’s hard. I mean, that’s why I always try to get my students to read foreign plays. This country is very cut off, I think.

So Wellman doesn't like the work of O'Neill or Miller or Albee or Williams. And yet audiences persist in wanting to see their work, those plays which invoke unsightly human emotions.

The interview continues...

You often encouraged us to let the play reveal itself, or let the structure reveal itself. Will you talk a little bit about that in comparison to the idea of conflict and resolution? 

In American theatre, structure is just a set of clichés. Plays are not about plots. They are about moments. And moments are about epiphanies when something happens that wakes you up. But mainstream plays are about reaffirming what the audience thinks it already knows. And I think that’s a waste of time. Why do that? Why not give them a slap in the face? Actually the most interesting playwrights I know are practicing a slap-in-the-face kind of theatre, whether they know it or not. I used to have students write a play with no structure.

As Theresa Rebeck said:

I seem to be constantly confronted by theater professionals who are more or less annoyed by the prospect of structure. One time I was at a wedding reception, for crying out loud, and I got seated at a table with a really famous genius of the contemporary American theater who had directed a play I admired. He had deconstructed a well-known play but the essence of the original story was still there, and the artistry and strangeness of his interpretation was beautifully balanced within the original tale. When I told him so, he went into a drunken rage. "All that structure, all that story," he growled, pouring himself more wine. "What a nightmare." 

"I love structure," I confessed. "I think it's beautiful." 

"Yeah, the audience loved it too," he sneered.

I don't know if she was speaking to Wellman in this story, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was.

Wellman doesn't like "cliches" and "plots" because he doesn't see the point of coherent structure that invokes the human sympathetic response. Human emotions aren't progressive - humans respond to various stimuli as they always have since before the theater of ancient Greece.

Mac Wellman should have had a career in technology or mathematics or anything that doesn't involve working with people and their stupid feelings. His current profession must be incredibly frustrating for him. He uses a metaphor of physical assault because he has no empathy for the audience. Or as Donald Trump fans would say: fuck your feelings.

But he is adored in American theater anyway, because many theater writers (critics, interviewers for American Theatre, etc.) are postmodernist pseudo-intellectuals who also feel similar contempt for theater audiences and have a constant yearning for plays that "break the boundaries" as I documented five years ago here - and as this recent review of Wellman's THE OFFENDING GESTURE demonstrates:

One of the many wonderful things about Mac Wellman’s work is that there are no boundaries to where he takes us. Sure, we can be on earth sometimes, but he’d rather not stay anywhere too recognizable for very long, and he would much prefer to be in space or on a different planet (often one of his own creation). Who can blame him? Earth is pretty awful. You know what/who else is awful? Hitler.

But every now and then there will be a critic who isn't as reverential as the rest and refuses to be baffled by Wellman's bullshit, as with these two:

David Barbour in  Light and Sound America: 

Yet these elements somehow fail to add up to a satisfying evening. Wellman's dog's-eye view of the semiotics of power seems awfully thin on ideas; it dawdles, it meanders, it pauses for passages of vocalizing, and scenes seem to repeat endlessly. Even the ravishing musical scenes (composed by Alaina Ferris and beautifully sung by the Mooncats) come to seem like so many interruptions. A last-minute reference to the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq comes out of nowhere in a strange attempt at capping off the show. It is merely mystifying; the circumstances of Hitler's brief and unconsummated flirtation with that country (which was encouraged by anti-British Iraqis) was nothing like the long-running calamity of Bush's Middle East misadventure. If this is the punch line to the joke, it's little better than Noble Wolf's snapper about Goering.

Christopher Kompanek in the Village Voice:

A third pooch, a bulldog named Wuffles who belongs to Winston Churchill, remains offstage (and is solely an invention of the playwright). He's used as a way to introduce Churchill's creation of Iraq (combining the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds — or, in doggyspeak, "Sunfish, Shits, and Turds"). This sort of wordplay appears frequently and amounts more to a source of annoyance than humor. Likewise, Layla Khoshnoudi plays Hitler (named Noble Wolf, the English translation of Adolf) with a farcical abandon, but the material is too opaque for any real levity to land...

...Wellman writes with a unique blend of poetry, puns, and non sequiturs that confound more than they illuminate and never fail to feel written. "I do the gesture as it gives me a please, a pleasure in the right front foot department," is one of Jackie's most straightforward lines, and it could easily have been lopped in half. While the title gesture is repeated throughout and mentioned ad nauseam, the actual offense is that it never rises to more than a background din. The final moments attempt to spell out a theme that should have been gradually building throughout, and only in the last line does Wellman finally pose a question worth asking.

Wellman and other postmodernists have their own cliches - the obsessive need to play with form and word salad at the expense of content, and macho bad-boy posturing, imagining violence upon the audience. Basically the angry young men of the theater, except the men haven't been young since the 20th century.

But you'll never get them to believe they are rehashing the same old shit - they will go to their graves believing they are the last word in daring, novel rebellion.

More and more Mac Wellman sounds like the Darren Nichols character from Slings and Arrows.

"...the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' "

I stopped contributing to Adam Lee's ongoing discussion of Atlas Shrugged due to censorship - because Lee's friend, who goes by the name of Azkyroth had a meltdown and began shrieking insults at me and insisted I was out to hurt the autistic because I speculated that Ayn Rand was on the autism spectrum.

To my knowledge, Lee has never objected to Azkyroth's habit of insulting anybody he disagrees with.

This censorship of disagreeable ideas -  thoughtcrimes to Social Justice Warriors like Lee and Azkyroth -  is a disgrace to rational discourse, and Lee has no sense of shame about it.

But I do check in to see how the Atlas Shrugged discussion is going, since some of Lee's commenters are quite astute and I'm always interested in learning what others think of Atlas Shrugged in-depth - I'm always afraid I might have missed something. And Lee does catch things I missed. He makes a good point (highlighted):

But after all that, Dagny objects, the tramp hasn’t told her who John Galt is or what he has to do with any of this. He says that it was something that happened at the first all-hands meeting after the company had agreed to go communist:

“‘This is a crucial moment in the history of mankind!’ Gerald Starnes yelled through the noise. ‘Remember that none of us may now leave this place, for each of us belongs to all the others by the moral law which we all accept!’‘I don’t,’ said one man and stood up. He was one of the young engineers… He stood like a man who knew that he was right. ‘I will put an end to this, once and for all,’ he said… ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ Then he walked out.…We never heard what became of him. But years later, when we saw the lights going out, one after another, in the great factories that had stood solid like mountains for generations, when we saw the gates closing and the conveyor belts turning still, when we saw the roads growing empty and the stream of cars draining off… then we began to wonder and to ask questions about him. We began to ask it of one another, those of us who had heard him say it… You see, his name was John Galt.”

If you missed that, John Galt vowed to destroy an entire civilization because one business went communist. Disproportionate retribution seems to be the only kind of retribution that Objectivists know. 

This leads back to the question, again, of how the looters came to take over the world. If the Twentieth Century Motor Company’s plan was such a failure, its competitors should have thrived, and once it went bankrupt, the whole idea should have been discarded as an object lesson in what not to do. Instead, for some reason, everyone copied this manifestly disastrous idea, and it spread to all of society despite bringing ruin to everyone who adopted it. Atlas has no real explanation for how this happened,

However, Lee completely misses the boat with the last sentence above. Atlas does have a real explanation for the ultimate root of communism:

...if you ever want to see pure evil you should see the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once... And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Although it is understandable that Lee missed it. It's so absurd it's easy to disregard the true significance of that passage. But I think there can be no doubt: Ayn Rand believes the root cause of "communism" and the views of anybody who disagrees with anything she believes, is sadism. Or to put a finer point on it - evil.

I think it's likely that Rand had undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome and she conflated the "neurotypical" view of the world with Communism. And since she could not understand the perspective of neurotypicals - and many on the autism spectrum express the same bafflement - she came to believe it must be due to willful malice.

This passage from Atlas Shrugged best expresses the almost mystical feelings that Rand's protagonists have about their enemies:

"Dagny, they're doing something we've never understood. They know something we don't, but should discover. I can't see it fully yet, but I'm beginning to see parts of it. That looter from the State Science Institute was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? Public opinion was just his name for it, but it's not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws - he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it - so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did. It was I who had to tell him he wasn't a looter but a customer and friend. That's what he needed from me. And that's what Dr. Stadler needed from you - it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail or my Metal. I don't know what it is that they think they accomplish - but they want us to pretend we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction, but, Dagny - I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don't give it to them. Because I know this much: that's our only chance...

...Yes," she said. "yes, I know what you've seen in them... I've felt it too - but it's only like something brushing past that's gone before I know I've seen it, like a touch of cold air, and what's left is always the feeling that I should have stopped it... I know that you're right. I can't understand their game but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and vast - and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to - "

This is no political or economic system they are talking about: the Soviet Communists were not known for caring what anybody thought - they did not hesitate to use force whenever they wanted, unlike Rand's "looters." And Communism doesn't express itself as "a touch of cold air."

This is about perceptual differences, not political differences. 

So the reason "communism" rules the world of Atlas Shrugged, in spite of the fact that it is presented as an objectively inferior socio-political system in the novel; and the reason that John Galt wants to destroy an entire civilization because of one bad business model is because these don't represent political or economic systems - they represent Ayn Rand's rage at living in a world dominated by neurotypicals, which "communism" embodies for her. 

Which makes sense since the major trauma of her early life (second only to the mechanical chicken incident) was the Communist revolution and the confiscation of her father's business. (Although ironically by ending prohibitions against Jews and women attending university, the Bolsheviks made it possible for Ayn Rand to get a higher education, a debt which she never acknowledged - but then she was notorious for claiming that nobody ever helped her.)

People perceiving the world in ways that Ayn Rand found incomprehensible were "evil" to her. And that's how she portrays those who are not the angular-faced producer heroes in Atlas Shrugged - as vermin that need to be exterminated, and that's why she put them on a train, listed their sins against Objectivism, and then put the train in a tunnel full of carbon monoxide. And then blew up the train. That's how Ayn Rand felt about a world controlled by neurotypicals.

And yes, there are those with Asperger's who are conscious of their hatred for neurotypicals, although of course not all people with Asperger's hate all neurotypicals.

• Wrong Planet: Why I hate neurotypicals
• Reddit: I hate neurotypical people
• Things that I hate: Neurotypicals

But on the other hand, at least one person with Asperger's describes neurotypicals as having "superpowers" for "mind-reading" abilities, and even compares this to the powers of a character on Star Trek:

A Betazoid is someone who has the power to sense others and read minds. Deanna is known for her contributions to the show as being able to sense when someone is angry, upset, anticipating battle, or even if the person is being deceitful. 

There was a particular Star Trek episode when Deanna Troi loses her Betazoid powers and she compares it to losing a sense.. such as losing sight, losing hearing, or losing a limb. It drove her CRAZY because she was unable to read people anymore. The rest of the crew was human, so they told her that losing her Betazoid powers was like stepping down to a human's level of understanding now she knew what it was like to not have that awareness. 

Even though Deanna Troi is not neurotypical NOR Autistic. The difference between her and the rest of the crew is how much awareness she had of other people. Deanna vs. a normal human is like a neurotypical vs. an Aspie. She even questioned Riker "How do you people live? Without being able to read others."

And the typical Asperger inability to read people is a problem for Rand's protagonist Hank Rearden, which she makes explicit in this passage:

Rearden had to decide how much he could risk to invest upon the sole evidence of a man's face, manner and tone of voice... 

"I guess I'm not smart enough to make the sort of deals needed nowadays," he said in answer to the unspoken thoughts the hung across his desk. 

The purchasing manager shook his head. "No Mr. Rearden, it's one or the other. The same kind of brain can't do both. Either you're good at running the mills or you're good at running Washington." 

"Maybe I ought to learn their methods." 

"You couldn't learn it and it wouldn't do you any good. You wouldn't win in any of those deals. Don't you understand? You're the one who's got something to be looted."

We'll never know for sure if Ayn Rand had Asperger's (unless we can somehow get hold of viable DNA from her I suppose) but I think that it's extremely likely, given all the evidence. Which does not explain her predilection for laissez-faire Capitalism - I think that is more explicable by her early life experiences - but it does help explain her extremely idiosyncratic presentation of the concepts of Communism and Capitalism. And speculating that she might have had Asperger's doesn't hurt anybody with the condition. Although of course such speculations would not be permitted in a world run by Social Justice Warriors like Adam Lee and friends. Which would be almost as ugly a dystopia as the world of Atlas Shrugged itself.

Bonus Rand artifact: An Actual Letter Ayn Rand Wrote To An Actual Teenage Girl