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RE: RAT Famous Playwrights, Mostly Dead
My favorite quote from the RAT list this millenium:
"But the Foxy Nazi was too quick for me. In a trice, his cane was between my
legs."
Thanks for playing Mr. Jones.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffrey Jones [SMTP:Diogenes_@compuserve.com]
> Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 7:42 AM
> To: INTERNET:rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com
> Subject: RE: RAT Famous Playwrights, Mostly Dead
>
> Why, I thought you'd never ask....
>
> Funnily enough, as I was riding the D train home last night, I happened
> to
> receive a swift kick in the butt. Or at least what I mistook for a swift
> kick in the butt. For a moment, I was hoping it might be my old
> girlfriend
> Tina L'Hotsky, in whose hands (?) buttkicking had been elevated to a high
> art but alas, as I turned, I saw it was only the wizened figure of Ernst
> "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Harvard-educated grammarian for the National
> Socialist
> party (it was Putzi, by the way, who had the brilliant idea of adding an
> umlaut to "Führer").
>
> "Soooo, Mr. Smarty-Pants," said he, "Who gets your vote for the best
> playwright of the millennium"
> "The best Aryan playwrigh?" I smirked.
> "Aus du lief," demurred Putzi.
> "Well, that's a no-brainer, you centenarian racist doucheball," I replied
> smartly. "Wm. Shakespeare gets my vote as well as that of a sizeable
> portion of the Deutches Volk ever since the Romantic era, if I'm not
> mistaken, even in translation. And as queer as Ernst Rohm, I might add"
> "Shakespeare hath a will, but Anne hath a way," purred the reformed
> anti-Semite. "I just want to know what you propose doing with the other
> 564
> years of the milennium, before he was born."
> "I fail to see the relevance of that remark," sez I.
> "No relevance at all. But it seems a little inconvenient to let all that
> time go to waste. If I had asked you that question in 1563, presumably you
> would have had no answer at all?"
> "No, presumably I would have been precognitive and said 'John Dryden,'" I
> replied somewhat testily. Putzi, being well over a hundred years old and
> a
> functional illiterate, despite his reputation for taste, also had a way of
> being tendentious.
> "And no doubt you would agree that his Henry IV, I & II, are not only a
> moving personal meditation on age and death but a trenchant examination of
> politics? More, say, than Jonson's Julius Caesar?"
> "I never read, Jonson's Julius Caesar," I lied.
> "Neither have I," he replied with a beatific smile. "That doesn't prevent
> me from having an opinion on it, does it? Better than Edward II? Better
> than..."
> "Shut the fuck up," I wittily replied.
> "And of the comedies," he went on, relentlessly, "and by comedies we
> shall
> say we mean the funny plays, not the strange dark nasty plays like Measure
> for Measure, you would prefer Midsummer Night's Dream over, say, 'The Way
> of the World?"
> "The Way of the World is not Shakespeare--Congreve's comedies, like those
> of Wycherly or Sheridan or Wilde may actually be funnier than
> Shakespeare's, but the bodies of work are not comparable! They are all
> writers of the second tier, surely, Putzi."
> "Is it the playwright or the play that matters?" he replied. "And
> speaking
> of Wilde, who is the best playwright of the 20th Century?"
> "What's wrong with Chekhov?" I replied.
> "I would have said Chekhov was the best playwright of the 19th Century,
> but
> then I would have said that Ubu Roi is arguably the greatest play of the
> 20th Century. Dates never were my strong point. Do you prefer "Cherry
> Orchard" to Vanya, and if so why? Is "Cherry Orchard" really superior to
> Gorki's "Enemies," and if it were not, would you be in a position to say
> so?"
> "Tell it to the Gauleiter," I snarled, untangling my fingers from this
> eyes. "School's out for summer, Putzi."
> "And of the American, you nominate this Jewish fellow, what's his name
> again, Müller....?"
> "OK, that's it, Hanftstaengl!" I barked. And knowing that I was about to
> undergo a half-hour racist harrangue I turned to go--forgetting for the
> moment that the D Train was still crossing the Manhattan Bridge. But the
> Foxy Nazi was too quick for me. In a trice, his cane was between my legs
> and I went sprawling to the floor of the car.
> "You are an idiot," he sneered. "Is that tiresome religious allegory,
> Godot, really superior to Endgame or Play? Is Death of a Salesman really
> superior to Long Day's Journey or Streetcar Named Desire--to list only
> plays that a well educated high school senior might be expected to
> discuss?
> Which of these plays about kicking a man when he's down is the better:
> The
> Local Stigmatic or Katzelmacher? Do you know anything?"
> "I might know something about the nineties," I said.
> "Let us see," he replied.
> "Len Jenkin's The Country Doctor was..."
> "Written in the Eighties!" He was nearly shouting now. "As was Gogol, as
> was American Notes."
> "I still think they're pretty good. Ditto John Steppling's 'Teenage
> Wedding," John Jesurun's "Riderless Horse" ditto Irene Fornes'..."
> "Stick to the Nineties, stick to what you know, what the hell do they
> teach
> up at Yale nowadays!"
> "OK, here are three:
> 1) Mac Wellman's Terminal Hip is the first play that actually
> revives the poetic tradition of the English theatre
> which was killed by the closing of the theatres. Why?
> Because
> Wellman shows not only how to avoid the
> use of "poetical" language, which so rapidly degenerates into
> archness (q.v. Robinson Jeffers, Archibald
> McLeash, Eliot, even Auden), but sidesteps the whole problem
> of meter. The language is so allusive, so
> non-referential, that is is clearly poetry--you are forced
> into
> "close listening"--yet there is none of the mustiness
> of all the previous attempts which tried, however indirectly,
> to reclaim shakespeare.
>
> 2) David Greenspan's The Myopia is not one play but
> three--simultanously the stories of the mid-career Warren
> G. Harding, a talking eyeball, and a giantess pursued by a
> hack writer who spends most of the time on the
> phone in the can--all wrapped up in elaborate stagings, and
> interlarded with preludes, forwards, essays
> and asides on the nature of theatre (including,
> believe it if you can, Carol Channing quoting extensively from
> Gertrude Stein's essay on theatre). Yet that is but half the
> description, for the play, as written, is also a monolog,
> and everything--Carol Channing, the stage directions, a
> smoke-filled room containing 20 republican politicos
> cutting a deal for the presidential ticket at the party
> convention--all this is rendered by David, WHO NEVER
> LEAVES THE CHAIR. This is a play that both explores and
> exhausts the richness of the theatrical.
>
> 3) David Hancocks "DEVIANT CRAFT" (the Frontera production) was as
> complex an articulation of intertextual
> realities, of layers of performance and illusion, as you could
> ever hope to see--a potted Tempest, wrapped inside
> a demented myth of something called the "Phlogiston
> Foundation."--and yet... IT WAS ESSENTIALLY IMPROVISED
> ANEW every night. This takes writing into territory I have
> never seen explored before.
>
> By now we were climbing the stairs to Lincoln Road ("another jew, another
> fairy" sniffed my cicerone) and Putzi, so far from being silenced, laughed
> at me and said, in his quavery voice, "A goodly tale i'faith, Comes there
> any more of it?" I wheeled upon him. I was filled with righteous fury,
> and
> I roared
> "I have answered three questions and that is enough. Don't give yourself
> airs! Do you think I can listen all night to such stuff? BE OFF, OR I'LL
> KICK YOU DOWNSTAIRS..."
> But it was too late. In the twinking of an eye, the aged reprobate had
> disappeared and there was only a page from the day's New York Times,
> gusting down the street. I went home and went to bed, and awoke the next
> morning from uneasy dreams.
>
>
> e. s.