Word: gelbart
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...Larry Gelbart...
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...
...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...
Fans have tried to find reasons for the turnaround. Gelbart attributes the Masonic cult to nostalgia: "Jackie is one of the few practitioners left of a style that appeals to an older audience. It's like listening to the Glenn Miller Band." Steve Allen compares Mason with Lenny Bruce: "He is more than a joke-joke comic; he is a philosopher." Mason seems to be the only one who admits that he is a "sensation for the same Jewish jokes that made me a failure." Perhaps, he thinks, it is the setting: "In the theater they...