RE: RAT Famous Playwrights, Mostly Dead

["Werner Trieschmann" <werner_trieschmann@adg.ardemgaz.com>]

I beg your pardon, they don't betray "little evidence of wide reading." That
is simply a guess on your part. If I say I choose Wilder as the century's best
or one of the century's best, how do you know what's been on my reading list
and what I've eliminated? 

Werner T. 
_______________________________________________________________________________

>From: rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com on Tue, Jan 18, 2000 9:09 AM
>Subject: RE: RAT Famous Playwrights, Mostly Dead
>To: INTERNET:rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com
>
>Political correctness has nothing to do with it.  IMHO these are obvious,
>conventional choices which could as easily have been made by the most
>mainstream, unimaginative artists. They betray little evidence of wide
>reading, original (if not to say individualistic or perverse) thought,
>boldness, daring, quirkiness, or any of the other things that might rescue
>American theatre from the endless succession of tedious and deriviative
>seasons it mounts (and laments) with the periodicity of the quartz atom.
>They are precisely the sage, safe, well-masticated choices I would expect
>of any well-read  high school senior.  They are so far from being wrong
>headed that they are banal. And thus, they are the very opposite of free
>thought, for they are the purest manifestation of received ideas.
>
>Sir, I put it to you thus:  If our tastes are no better than those of our
>dreary forbears, what are we but jejune, querulous, underfunded versions of
>their grim treadmill of mediocrity.  For what, precisely, do we have to
>offer if not better ideas?
>
><<el Sinico>>
>
>