Word: macbird
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...essays are generally impressive. While Critic Richard Oilman deftly shoots down MacBird!, Historian Theodore Roszak wades into "The Complacencies of the Academy: 1967" with a spirited attack on today's professors for abnegating their traditional responsibility as philosophes. Instead of serving as the community's moral conscience, Roszak charges, most academics now function as multiversity service-station attendants, filling up students with credits and subjects, fretting about nothing more profound than their own tenure and sabbaticals...
Eleven years ago, the play which struck New York as daring and venturesome was the ill-fated Broadway production of Waiting for Godot. Today, the same nerves have apparently been hit by the highly profitable Off-Broadway prank, MacBird. Obviously, these works have little in common aside from their relative popular momentum and their respective pans from Walter Kerr. Beckett's sad farce, already found on at least three Harvard reading lists, seems firmly included in the century's catalogue of major literature. Barbara Garson, on the other hand, has chosen quite deliberately to write on water in order...
...unhappy when I couldn't find a corresponding scene (in Shakespeare)--then I had to write the scene myself. I'm glad I used Shakespeare; it allowed me, an inexperienced playwright, to shape things in the play." Macbeth, Hamlet and Julius Casear provide matrices for most of MacBird's episodes, and supply the better part of the linguistic embroidery. Miss Garson also draws on Othello for bits of martial brouhaha and on Richard II for the pervasive vegetable metaphor that crops up in MacBird's first press conference ("This land will be a garden carefully pruned...
...tedious dialogue on radical strategy from the witches) and a generous deployment of sound and properties, have tightened up an unwieldy piece of theatre. The mounting racket of loudspeakers and the only rarely excessive musical numbers create a rhythm which jars the principals past MacBird's remaining snags. John Seitzg, who stood in on Philip Hanson's MacBird last week, was purple with Texas affect and--but for an inexplicable and apparently deliberate resemblance to F.D.R.--vehemently convincing. William Lafe, Roger Davis and Kevin O'Neal provide three mail-order Ken O'Duncs who slip in and out of Kennedese...
...What? MacBird is hardly a visitant from the infernal backside of American political thought--"a genuine happening in which an underground author confronted the overworld, exposing dangerous private fantasies to public eyes and ears" (Brustein) or "a needed corrective, a purgative of our Stygian world" (Clureman). There is nothing cathartic in its grim charade, and this is not because reality has surpassed the imitation. It is because Miss Garson's satire renders her targets immune to further burlesque by grasping--just once, and fleetingly--all the obvious uglinesses of American politics without giving a sweet damn for what they point...