Word: mao
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...right to fail is honored more often than not. Ever since the success of Virginia Woolf in 1962, Edward Albee has exercised this right annually. Tiny Alice, The Ballad of the Sad Café, A Delicate Balance, Malcolm, Everything in the Garden, and now Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-tung represent the alarming deterioration of a formidable talent...
Albee's characters have never been quite believable, but he used to have a fine knack for making their hostilities waspishly real. His weakness has been an inability to spin a plot, which is why he has adapted and borrowed so much. In Box-Mao he tries to make a virtue out of that weakness by eliminating any narrative whatsoever. The resulting story vacuum masquerades as an experiment in abstraction...
After this, the box is supplied with a raised platform so that it seems like the sun deck of an ocean liner. On it sit and stand four characters. One is Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Wyman Pendleton), who mouths Marxist-Leninist platitudes about the irreparable decline of the imperialist West. Another character is a decayed society drone (Nancy Kelly) who recalls her frustrated attempt at suicide together with such intimate details of her sex life as the smooth tautness of her husband's scrotum. Another woman (Sudie Bond) recites the doggerel couplets of a poem called Over the Hill...
Evil Wind. Less political-minded than the other proletarian princesses, but perhaps as prominent, is Lin Toutou, daughter of Marshall Lin Piao, Mao's top lieutenant and heir apparent. Her articles from the Air Force News, including an unusually emotional tribute to the late Air Force Commander Liu Ya-lou, are said to be prominently displayed under the glass plate on Marshal Lin's desk. Both the fatherly pride and the daughterly sentimentality are surprising-if ever so slight-touches of humanity in a country that has lately taken to warning its youth against "the evil wind...
They're burning books again in Red China. Singled out for censure in Mao's land, according to the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta-a potboiler that likes to call the kettle black-are the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Twain, Steinbeck, London, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky...