Something like Melville's semi-fictional Temple First, only this time much closer to home than Mercury Lounge in NYC, here's another cool place where I'm not welcome anymore:
"... performers and masked, vaccinated theatergoers finally can see one another again at the Guthrie." -- Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 9, 2021.
What sort of play did our august Guthrie choose for the entertainment of properly masked (get outta here with your redneck bandannas and neck gaiters) patrons with valid vax papers? One that trashes the United States Constitution. More generously, one that deconstructs the Constitution:
Of course! God I wish this was satire.
Nonetheless, many of the comments on Hewitt's predictable take give me hope--for instance these wise words from "pastrysnob":
Ms Schreck and Ms Beck haven't taken this play far enough on the road if "playing to the Guthrie choir" is as far as they get. More appropriate, it would seem, would be to go back out to current American Legion posts in, say, Greater Minnesota and see how the audience and critics in Willmar and Elbow Lake react. The walls in those outposts are also plastered with photos of past post commanders, until very recently all white males. To get your mug on those walls and be elected commander, you had to do the Constitution's dirty work - serving in a combat capacity, as often as not in ill-conceived wars like Iraq and Viet Nam, dating back to the more noble WW's 1 and 2. Some benefit eh, from being privileged white males. But today, thanks to the very same Constitution and its adaptability, some of those more recent post commanders look a bit different. The Legion, it would seem, has left the playwright and her message behind....The living document known as the US Constitution sets forth the rights framework within which enables the likes of Mizzus Schreck and Beck to concoct this self evident, virtue shaming discourse and then take it to Broadway and on the road to make a bundle pandering to the smug, condescending, self-important Guthrie crowd.
http://strib.mn/3BwJcas
Related posts:
- Welcome beautiful outlaw people
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/08/welcome-beautiful-outlaw-people-who-are.html
- The Two Temples by Herman Melville
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-two-temples-by-herman-melville.html
- My answer to Google
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/09/my-answer-to-google.html
- Dedicated to Steve Earle
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2022/01/dedicated-to-steve-earle.html
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