Stage Right

Rob Kendt (The Wicked Stage: Prophetic Brit(s)) highlights a Jeremy McCarter Newsweek article from December which uses Caryl Churchill's 2001 play "Far Away" as touchstone for what the Bush era.

Kendt doesn't draw out the quotes from the McCarter piece which I think says more about McCarter as former reviewer for New York Magazine and now Senior Writer covering arts, culture and entertainment for Newsweek.

George W. Bush's presidency hasn't been especially accomplished, or ennobling, but it has turned out to be awfully fantastical. Almost by the month, things that once seemed barely imaginable became all too real: an election better suited to a banana republic than a mature democracy, airliners converted to lethal weapons (see also exploding sneakers, powdery letters of death), an American city left to drown.

And then there's:

When the play reached New York in 2002, the final scene's vision of all-out war offered a twisted but true-to-life reflection of the paranoia we were feeling in those post-9/11 days. Six years later it speaks well of Churchill's prophetic powers that the other scenes now seem just as timely. The nighttime beatings that Joan witnesses (and the sorry excuses her aunt supplies) anticipate waterboarding, "stress positions," rendition. The hellish parade of hat-wearing prisoners now seems a grisly metaphor for the way that soldiers toyed—sometimes fatally—with inmates at Abu Ghraib.

Finally:

The fact that we've fought two wars, abrogated a treaty here and there, and squandered the affection of much of the species doesn't necessarily mean that fashion-show executions are nigh. But after all the strange twists of the past eight years, we might wake up to a reality that's weirder still.

Again, this speaks to the pervasive attitude that though most main-stream Americans would see these characterizations of the past 8 years as a matter of opinion and worthy of debate, within the bubble the typical theatre critic lives these are given facts.

It seems McCarter is no longer just reviewing plays, but also making social and political commentary in the spirit of NY Times Frank Rich. God help us all.