Word: lazebnik
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...were Mad about Mintz, you may well be disappointed by Philip LaZebnik's latest offering. American in Purgatory is basically warmed over Mintz; shorter and more tightly-knit than its predecessor, it features many of the same actors bandying about similar jokes and singing similar songs within the now almost predictable absurdist framework that has become a LaZebnik trademark. Somehow it all seemed a lot fresher the first time around...
Unlike Harvard's other student playwrights--the authors of Bicentennial Follies, for example--LaZebnik draws his chief inspiration from literary classics rather than from the contemporary American scene. His technique, like Tom Stop-pard's in Rosencrantz and Guildenstein are Dead, is to abstract well-known characters from their original dramatic setting and place them in an absurd world where they toy with the conventions of language, and quest--unsuccessfully, of course--for the meaning of their existence...
...home-cooked, so to speak--virtually all the authors are Harvard-connected, and all but two of those are undergraduates. The numbers that get the biggest laughs and seem to ring the truest are, not surprisingly, the ones that involve Harvard in-jokes. "Dean Epps' Love Song" by Philip LaZebnik, a mishmash of double talk that praises love as a viable alternative, somehow sounds funnier than it really is, but "Caesar's Wife" by Peter Homans and Bill Johnsen, which has a whining Sissela Bok complaining about all those cocktail parties and privately longing to be married to "a Brutus...
...Hamlet plot has always been an archetypal sources for playwrights. As diverse writers as Goethe (Clavigo), Chekhov (Seagull), W.S. Gilbert (who wrote a play let in which Rosencrantz and Ophelia are secret lovers). Philip LaZebnik '75 (whose Mad About Mintz not only parodies Hamlet but is riddled with themes of death), and Paris Barclay '78 (whose ambitious though now moribund production of Niccolo & The Prince featured Hamlet as a major--character), all have pirated shamelessly from Shakespeare...
...almost said "this kind of show", making it part of a category that couldn't even be considered when talking about The Teeth of Mons Herbers, which was sui generis in a way MAM isn't and doesn't try to be. But LaZebnik's next work--based on the assassination of James A. Garfield by a disgruntled office-seeker--might offer proof that success hasn't spoiled him. His talent is too original for us to be able to afford to lose...