Word: smugness
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...were so smug about...
...maybe the problem goes deeper than our smug habit of attributing crime to individual character flaws. What we seem to be forgetting--both those of us who want to be 10 again and those who want to lock up 10-year-olds in the pen--is that childhood is not just a triumph of miniaturization. Kids really are different, which is what seven-year-old pilot Jessica Dubroff's death last April should have taught us. And the line dividing the kids from the grownups is at least as serious and consequential as that other life-cycle boundary we fuss...
...likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall is a lack of philosophical humility, a smug assumption that our "moral" intuitions can be trusted as a guide to true morality. The effects have ranged from homicide to genocide...
...others. Brad (played by Farnsworth, disguised unsubtly on the program as "Ichabod Crane"), a schlumpy former grad student, is stuck in his childhood home in New Orleans because his selfish siblings refuse to help him take care of their ailing mother. Scott (Jason Chaffin), the older brother, is a smug, cold yuppie; Jane (Sarah Yellen), the sister, is a cruel harpy masquerading as a p.c. environmentalist. Poor old Mom, played by the usually effervescent Shar von Boskirk, has nothing to do but sit center-stage for the duration of the play, gurgling and babbling unconvincingly. Those...
...raucous comedy does not let up. The play has vast reserves of Saturday morning cartoon antics combined with the smug humor of Saturday Night Live. Though the action is struck in a loud key, the actors aren't obscured or overwhelmed. As Jackie, Lane Burgess is convincing and endearing. She succeeds at the difficult task of humanizing Jackie the icon, adding flesh and blood to the mysterious outline produced by pop culture. Roberta Kastelic is also memorable as Christina (Coke can-in-hand) Onasiss. Her character introduces a dark touch to the second half of the play as she terrorizes...