Word: macbird
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...MacBird! by Barbara Garson has been awaited with all the fierce anticipatory noises surrounding a tumbrel arriving at the guillotine. Long before the play's off-Broadway opening last week, an honor guard of coterie intellectuals, including Critic Dwight Macdonald and Yale Drama School Dean Robert Brustein, went into tub-thumping ecstasy over MacBird, which promised a dramatic severing of President Johnson's head. In addition, it capitalized emotionally on a winter of public discontent with L.B.J.-the poll-recorded loss of favor with the electorate, the supposed credibility gap, concern about Viet Nam, Johnson's embroilment...
...reality, MacBird is a mangy little terrier of a satire, nipping at the trouser cuffs of the mighty. Its bark is its bite. Holier than thou in its complacency and self-indulgently assured of how In-funny it is, MacBird is an off-campus transplant of college humor...
...parody and paraphrase Macbeth; President Johnson is represented in the title role and Mrs. Johnson is Lady Macbeth. King Duncan, renamed John Ken O'Dunc, is clearly President Kennedy, and Duncan's sons become Bobby and Teddy. Nothing loath to be malicious, Garson argues that MacBird (Stacy Keach) lures John Ken O'Dunc to his Texas ranch and arranges his assassination in order to become king, while his henchmen sabotage Teddy Ken O'Dunc's airplane. In hand-to-hand combat with Bobby Ken O'Dunc, MacBird dies of a heart attack, and Bobby...
...there no offense in it?" King Claudius might ask. Despite MacBird's slanderous premise, the answer is: amazingly little. Playwright Garson fuzzes up the key event to the point that it cannot be taken seriously as an intimation of reality. Shots are heard, but MacBird, unlike Macbeth, is never seen with the murder weapon; nothing really connects him with the crime, except a panting desire for advancement and a few veiled hints and innuendoes...
...surprisingly, MacBird and his lady engineer the assassination of a leader named John. Don't look for the Kennedys on opening night, if there...