Word: contra
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While watching Larrv Gelbart's production Mastergate at the American Repertory Theater (ART), the one question that might creep into one's head is "is this live or is this Memorex?" Gelbart's satire, based on the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, has replicated the images of the Congressional investigation so closely that one feels as if he has walked into a time warp...
...case of the Iran-Contra affair, the fictitious Mastergate scandal takes on the air of the surreal. Like Contragate, Mastergate is based on the diversion of government funds. Through the wiles of CIA Director Wiley Slaughter (Alvin Epstein)--a thinly disguised lampoon of former real-life CIA Director William Casey--$800 million in government funds is diverted to produce a Hollywood epic. "Tet Offensive"--the film which was based on the book, "Tet Offensive," which was further based on the real-life Vietnam war attack--was to be shot in Central America. Only this time the target, that...
...virtue of its subject matter Mastergate cannot help but be funny. The televised Iran-Contra hearings gave us a glimpse, and a nauseating one at that, of the theater of politics. And Gelbart, the creator of the long-lived MASH television series, has no trouble at making the macabre laughable...
Then again, Gelbart received a great deal of help. He based much of his script on transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings and from Watergate events. The transcripts, of course, might be considered funny in themselves. But Gelbart amplifies the circuitous and consistently evasive discourse of today's politicians by writing in what he calls "half-speak," a play on Orwell's double-speak. A perfect example of half-speak comes when key witness Steward Butler (Harry S. Murphy) says (or rather, doesn't say), "I can only reiterate what I've repeated before...
...entirely geared to overthrowing the Sandinista regime. Put simply, it made no sense to negotiate with the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas when the only deal the U.S. wanted was their abdication. And besides, they couldn't be trusted to live up to any agreement. Eight years, $250 million and one contra % army later, the Sandinistas are still in power. It was one of Reagan's starkest foreign policy failures, producing neither a military victory nor a diplomatic breakthrough...