It is not ridiculous to expect that theater departments (especially at publicly-funded institutions) prioritize storytelling and, well, drama ahead of the strident promotion of pet political causes and the vilification of those causes’ detractors.

From my experience, this basic expectation is often given the Vaudeville hook at the University of Georgia. This past semester, I signed up for a Theater Appreciation course to “develop a working vocabulary … of the theater” (from the syllabus) and, much more importantly, earn my degree’s requisite credit in the fine arts. The class itself was well taught and politically benign, as any introductory theater class should be. Our professor was impartial and, where his opinions shone through, he encouraged students to think for themselves on the issues. If only the rest of the department was so tolerant.

I attended four plays as part of the course. My only exposure to drama coming into college was a handful of high school plays—wholly uncontroversial musicals like “Anything Goes” and “Seussical.” College productions, I thought, would follow that formula.

Two of the plays did follow the formula, and they were far and away the best of the lot: the university production of “The 39 Steps,” a Monty Python-esque parody of a Hitchcock rendition of a genre-generating British spy novel (say that three times fast), was one of the most innovative performances I’ve seen in any medium; the production of “All My Sons”—even though it was written by a Communist fellow traveler—was thought-provoking and moving in all the right ways, and its acting was given a booster shot by the addition of professional talent in Broadway actor and alumnus Brian Reddy.

The other two were not nearly as successful, in part because both seemed hell-bent on bludgeoning their audiences with a political message.

The first of these was “This is What I Heard” (the phrase is commonly used at the beginning of Buddhist sutras), written and performed by a student group called The Justice Agents, which, disappointingly enough, has nothing to do with D.C. superheroes and everything to do with liberal politics.

The play incorporated the theater techniques of Augusto Boal, a Communist who believed that traditional forms of theater are oppressive and do not allow theatergoers to express themselves. Boal’s vision was to transform passive spectators into “spect-actors” by empowering them to take part in a play’s proceedings and change the course of events.

“This is What I Heard” used Boal’s methods to “raise awareness of various social issues” (in this case homelessness) and “encourage bystanders to engage in conversation.” As a play meant to raise awareness of homelessness—a major issue in Athens-Clarke County and a worthwhile goal for a student group—the production was a success. As a play meant to foster open-minded interaction between cast and audience, however, “This is What I Heard” was disappointing—predictably so. As written, all of the play’s antagonists were Snidely Whiplash caricatures of conservatives.

Over the course of the play, the play’s heroine was harassed by a money-crazed boyfriend, a Rand-reading rapist, a pair of racist rednecks, a coterie of profits-over-people mid-level managers, a pharisaical church organizer (who turned away the play’s ill-starred protagonist while cooing “We’ll be praying for you”), a Tom Friedman-quoting character named “Bastard Boy,” and the Great Exploiter itself, McDonald’s. It would seem that to the Justice Agents, open-mindedness does not extend as far as the political right.

But maybe I walked straight into that one—after all, student groups can promote whatever agenda they want, however self-defeating. The faculty, surely, wouldn’t stoop to such sophomoric depths. Right? Not quite.

The other production was an “updated” rendition of “Life is a Dream,” a Spanish Golden Age classic by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. “Life is A Dream” is the story of a king who locks away his son, Segismundo, in a tower at an early age because an oracle predicted he would be a violent ruler. The play raises timeless issues of free will and fate and, after reading the original translation, I do not see why the play needed to be modernized in the first place. It was, though, and the product made a mockery of the original work.

The updated play was written by George Pate, a PhD student, and Dr. Marla Carlson, a faculty member. Dr. Carlson is author of such vital and seminal—I only wish I were using the figurative meaning of that word—work as “Performative Pornography” and “Furry Cartography: Performing Species,” which was funded through a public research grant. The pair constructed a modern narrative framework to bookend the original plot: their creation tells the story of two grifters who convince a board of insecure corporateers that they have invented a machine that will fulfill its users’ wildest dreams—but only if they earned their wealth through self-sufficiency, with no help from others. Carlson and Pate use this scenario to ridicule the notion of the self-made man, for none of the fat cats (who all came from some level of privilege) could claim absolute self-sufficiency.

From there, they singled out Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan for scorn: at one point, a bewildered corporate exec extolled the Gipper (with much sarcasm) for “tearing down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands.” Needless to say, the line drew guffaws from a sympathetic audience. If you are confused by my description of the play, that’s because it made as little sense to me as it does to you. The framework was clunking and confusing, and my confusion was compounded by the fact that many of the play’s male characters were performed by female actors, in a bizarre experiment in “gender bending” (their words, not mine).

Needless to say, my exposure to university theatre is limited, at best— I have only attended one season of production, and even then I had to miss a few productions (“He Said, She Said, Ze Said: Gender Stories,” for example). So maybe I’m one hundred percent wrong in my indictment of the department, and the aforementioned performances—along with upcoming performances like the GLAAD-approved “God Sees Dog”—are anomalies, not at all indicative of a department that is really composed of impartial and dedicated scholars in the mold of Walter Cronkite and Jon Stewart.

I just won’t hold my breath waiting for a David Mamet production.

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975.

If I speak with some hostility about the Boomers’ failings and excesses it’s partially because that’s my nature as a Millennial/Gen Yer. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books each generation acts as a check on the excesses of its parent generation. As young adults in the ‘60s and ‘70s the Baby Boomers declared war on the cultural institutions of their GI Generation parents. The GIs (born 1900-1924) are what Howe and Strauss describe as a “civic” generation; they were driven toward creating social harmony. The Boomers (an “idealist” generation) were a check on that, fomenting greater individualism in the 1970s and culture wars in the 1990s. That our electoral maps are so split today is their fault. When the Civic GI President Ronald Reagan won in 1984 it was almost a solid red map. My generation – also a Civic generation – is a reaction against Baby Boomer extremes and will seek to create greater social harmony. This will become much more apparent as the younger Gen Yers in junior high and high school now start to make waves in 10 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet (born 1957) has been emblematic of the divisive Boomer paradigm for his whole career. His plays and films are famous for the “Mamet style” of short bursts of memorable dialogue and the mainstreaming of casual profanity.

And so in his book detailing his rightward shift away from a “Brain-Dead” Hollywood leftist, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, the reader finds this same mindset applied to the political essay. The need to divide the world into clear cut categories of Liberalism and Conservatism pervades the text. Mamet even capitalizes them to Emphasize the Great Importance of the Political War between Boomer Liberalism and Boomer Conservatism. Gone is Simon’s sense of skepticism in Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine.

The Secret Knowledge is a collection of 39 short essays. Mamet has crafted an experience like the signature Boomer film “Forrest Gump.” Life is like a box of chocolates – and devouring the delicious morsels of Mamet’s book is an addictive treat, filled with surprises. Who cares if it’s just a political sugar rush? Most conservatives are familiar with the bibliography Mamet cribs his ideas from: Sowell, Hayek, VDH, Friedman, etc. Thus they won’t learn anything life-changing but will still enjoy the thrill of Mr. Mamet’s Wild Ride. And if that sentiment doesn’t summarize the Boomer cinema of Lucas-Spielberg-Bruckheimer-Moore-Stone then what does?

The endowment of the Baby Boomer Hollywood Apostates is the call to fight, the drive to confront with big special effects, and the need to divide ourselves from the intolerable. This makes for satisfying blockbuster popcorn films and effective (James Carville-Karl Rove style) political warfare. While there is plenty to critique in the failings of the Boomer presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush credit must be given: the Boomer political strategists were masters. Too bad they wasted their brains on winning the electoral fights while ignoring (and sometimes exacerbating) the more vital policy fights.

In Part 4 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll see how the Gen X leader Andrew Breitbart is reinventing this confrontational spirit – what he calls Righteous Indignation — and redirecting it in a more pragmatic, effective way than the Boomers ever could.

This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left.

Primetime Propaganda is not a content analysis of the last 60 years of TV. Instead, Shapiro wore his Harvard Law baseball cap and interviewed some of Hollywood’s most influential television creators. Assuming from his alma mater and last name that he was one of them, the Hollywood insiders were too honest for their own good. Time and again Shapiro found them confessing that A) Yes, the Left dominates Hollywood, B) Yes, conservatives are blacklisted, C) Yes, they did try and use television to push their politics, and D) No, they did not see anything wrong with any of this in the slightest.

(For the evidence on tape see Big Hollywood’s thorough archive of the many damning admissions from the creators of history’s most influential TV shows.)

The revelations Shapiro unearths are only the beginning. This is also a masterful history book that will transform readers’ understanding of television. Shapiro leaps back to the 1950s and in the first 220 pages of the book interweaves his blockbuster interviews with the story of how a small clique of executives, producers, and writers created most of the TV shows that have shaped four generations of Americans. The heart of the book is the second and third chapter, focusing on the history of TV comedies and dramas. Shapiro goes down the line from The Honeymooners to All in the Family to Cheers and Friends. He documents the subversion of the cop and legal dramas from the early days of righteous cops and prosecutors to the nihilism of Hill Street Blues and Picket Fences.

The picture that emerges from Shapiro is of Hollywood leftists distinct from Washington, DC Democratic Party leftists, ACORN community organizing leftists, and the academic Ivory Tower leftists. The defining characteristic of the Hollywood leftist is an embarrassing abundance of anti-intellectualism. Most of the producers and writers Shapiro profiles have barely thought through their politics. If that’s the case then what drives Hollywood to embed leftist ideas in their programs and exclude conservatives? Superficial notions about what feels right. The Hollywood Left fantasizes that they are the champions of the “have-nots,” the outsiders, the oppressed.

This anti-intellectualism is why in Hollywood the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT politics are the social issues. (As evidence that Hollywood leftists care about these subjects above all others, observe how they will tolerate hawkish, fiscally conservative Republicans as long as they’re pro-gay and pro-choice. Shapiro’s example: “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry.)

Hollywood is not a town of deep thinkers. It’s a bubble filled with deep feelers. Next time a Hollywood leftist is on TV spouting their clichés note how often they “feel” instead of “think.” That’s a Freudian slip confessing a disagreement not with what conservatives think but in how conservatives think. The rejection is not just the Western tradition of individual liberty, but in the Enlightenment process of rational thought.

What are the unique implications for apostates of this church of the Left?

In parts two, three, and four of this series I’ll explore Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. Each author’s book is an important component in the revolt against the Hollywood Left’s mental gulag. They each bring the best of what their generation has to offer in the fight to retake our culture and our country. Read all three along with Shapiro’s book and a comprehensive picture of the Hollywood Left – and the means for defeating it – emerges.

In the battle for the soul of our country, popular culture is the biggest guy in the room.  And it’s time that conservatives took a swing.  The Powerline Prize contest is a potential haymaker in one of the most important battles of our campaign.

Here’s how it describes itself:

The Power Line Prize of $100,000 will be awarded to whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the significance of the federal debt crisis. Prizes will also be awarded to the runner-up and two third-place finishers. Anyone can enter the contest—individuals, companies (e.g., advertising agencies) or any other entity, as long as the contest rules are followed. Any creative product is eligible: videos, songs, paintings, screenplays, Power Point presentations, essays, performance art, or anything else, as long as the product is unique to the contest and has not previously been published or otherwise entered the public domain. Entries may address the federal debt crisis in its entirety, or a specific aspect of the debt crisis, such as: the impact of the debt crisis on the young; the role played by the “stimulus” (Where did the money go? Why didn’t it stimulate?); how entitlements drive the debt crisis; the current federal deficit; how the debt crisis impacts the economy; or any other aspect of the debt crisis. The contest is non-partisan. Its purpose is to inform the public about the federal debt crisis.

Conservatives often dismiss the world of art as a milieu of posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.  This is because an enormous amount of what is today labeled as “art” is manufactured by   posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.

However, mockery – while necessary and awesome – is not enough.  We need to get into that world – into all of the creative worlds – and compete.  That’s the lesson the ubiquitous Ben Shapiro teaches in his bestselling new book on TV, “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV,” and that seems to be the intent of the Powerline Prize contest.

But can conservatives make art?  I don’t know – maybe we should ask David Mamet.  But there is a problem with conservative art, which is the same with all art in general – most of it sucks.  Most art is bad.  Conservative art seems to be bad in its own unique way.  As my Twitter pal @Salty_Hollywood – a Hollywood graphic artist – remarked the other night over drinks, “Can we get some conservative art without flags and eagles?”  I agree – I like flags and eagles as much as the next right-wing knuckledragger, but frankly that well has gone dry.  As the old saying goes, we need some new clichés.

The Powerline Prize contest is one way we on the conservative side can start to look for an answer.  But it can’t be the final word – it needs to be only the first in a long process of creating art for our sake.

While reading your new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” I thought, My God, in crucifying liberals, this guy is going to infuriate a huge chunk of the people who pay money to see plays. Are you concerned that you’re alienating your public?
I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When “American Buffalo” came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, “How dare he use that kind of language!” Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for. …

Don’t you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
Of course not. At that time in my life I didn’t have a penny, and I was glad to be working at entry-level jobs. Having lived for quite a while longer, I see life from a different perspective. What am I going to do, go on denouncing capitalism all my life? …

You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most?
All of them gall me the most. Listen, Shelby Steele and I were on a panel, and some white woman asked, “What can we do for the African-American community?” There was a long pause, and he said, in the saddest voice I’ve ever heard, “Leave us alone.” It’s appalling what the government has done to the great African-American community in the last 50 years.

Full interview here.

So I rejoiced—and I also sympathized. Breaking free of leftism while working in show business is like escaping from “The Matrix” only to find oneself in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” You wake to a risky but bracing new reality of individual liberty, limited government and free markets and are instantly beset by zombified statist dreamers determined either to make you rejoin their ranks or to destroy you. Mr. Mamet reports that a certain prominent left-leaning newspaper actually panned his first openly conservative play not once but twice for good measure. (Libertarian humorist Greg Gutfeld has introduced a “Mamet Attack Clock” on his late-night cable show to measure just how fast critics will now downgrade their opinions of the playwright’s work.)

Under such circumstances, it is natural that Mr. Mamet would develop the urge to cry out, like Kevin McCarthy in the famous last scene of “Body Snatchers”: “Listen to me! Please listen!” From that urge, no doubt, arises Mr. Mamet’s new work of nonfiction, “The Secret Knowledge.” It is his attempt to explain and disseminate the thinking behind his conversion to the right.

“Liberalism is a religion,” he writes. “It affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed. Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.”

Full article here.

You can purchase “The Secret Knowledge” here.

Weekly Standard:

[David] Mamet had been brought to campus by Hillel, and the subject of his talk was “Art, Politics, Judaism, and the Mind of David Mamet.” There wasn’t much talk of Judaism, however, at least not explicitly. He arrived late and took the stage looking vaguely lost. He withdrew from his jacket a sheaf of papers that quickly became disarranged. He lost his place often. He stumbled over his sentences. But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it.

It was as nervy a speech as I’ve ever seen, and not quite rude—Mamet was too genial to be rude—but almost. The students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed. The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd. Two couples in front of me shot looks to one another as Mamet went on—first the tight little smiles, then quick shakes of the head, after a few more minutes the eye-rolls, and finally a hitchhiking gesture that was the signal to walk out. Several others followed, with grim faces.

It was too much, really. It’s one thing to titillate progressive theatergoers with scenes of physical abuse and psychological torture and lines like “You’re f—ing f—ed.” But David Mamet had at last gone too far. He’d turned into a f—ing Republican.

Much, much more here.

And don’t miss Powerline’s take, either.

If you aren’t familiar with his work, he also wrote movies like The Untouchables, The Verdict and Glengarry Glen Ross.

His new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” elaborates on this journey, condemning the left in devastating fashion.

What happens to people who do such things?

My prediction is that Mamet, if he isn’t disowned by his industry already, will be.

The break will be ugly, but clean.

He will be dismissed as a bitter crank who probably sucked to begin with.

All those awesome plays and films once praised by critics and celebs will now be reassessed.

As crap.

Because Mamet abandoned group-think.

Overnight, he will turn from legendary to lackluster – whose attack on the left must be due to artistic suckiness.

Which is why Red Eye has started the David Mamet Attack Countdown, which monitors the days until a once glorified artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.

He is not, of course, but it won’t matter. He walked away from his tribe, and will suffer for it.

While our clock counts down to reputation annihilation, I beg you to buy his book.

I read it, and it reminded me of my own journey: an abandonment of phony, wrong-headed earnestness, coupled with a growing disgust for the toxic stupidity that is political correctness.

That he chooses America over his craft – requires that he now be trashed by those around him.

Which says more about them, than him.

So last Saturday, Earth Hour took place- that mystical event when cities around the world pledge to turn off the power, and go dark for an hour.

It began in Australia in 2007, and has since spread like a pimply rash to more than 130 countries.

But If you missed it, it’s not your fault.

I totally drank my way through it – and the only thing I had off were my pants.

And now, after five years, some commentators are pronouncing the fad over, which suggest we’re all uncaring jerks.

Which I know I am anyway.

And that’s where I’m going with this.

See, if you took a bunch of “caring” people, and a bunch of people like me, and compared our environmental behaviors, would you really see a difference?

To steal a quote from David Mamet’s new book, “no adherent of either view is going to live his life in congruity with all, or even most of the precepts he believes himself to endorse.”

Meaning, the girl lecturing me on carbon offsets, is still lecturing me at the bar, which is powered by oil and electricity. And we’re also drinking the same beer, trucked in by giant gas guzzling semi’s. We are both the same (except I made her up).

Anyway, it’s no wonder “Earth Hour’s” in trouble. Fact is, no one is going to sit in the dark for that long, when there’s fun stuff to do that involves electricity and/or batteries.

Which is why this earnest dreck will continue, in sympathy only. Meaning, people will engage in this symbolic activity… only with their feelings.

“Oh isn’t that a nice idea,” says a concerned citizen, as she boards her flight to Prague. For that moment, just thinking about “earth hour” feels like you’re doing something good – even if the chihuaha you’re holding was trucked in from Guam.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist homophobe.

Tonight:

Jim Norton!

Jedidiah Bila!

and a first-timer Krystal Ball!

The setting is a conference room of a law firm.  Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) and his white partner Jack Lawson (James Spader) are interviewing a prospective client (Richard Thomas).  The client, a wealthy white man, is standing trial for the rape of a black woman.

Two expert attorneys interviewing a prospective client is the perfect device for Mamet to not only inform the audience of the facts at hand and the idiosyncratic personalities of the characters we will spend the next hour and a half of our lives with, but it also serves as a perfect showcase for the playwright’s legendary use of dialogue, timing, over-lapping speech patterns and no-holds-barred language.  For a Mamet addict, this is heroin.

It is a chance to watch a conversation that anyone outside that room was never meant to hear.  And the language the characters use reflect the comfortable and brazen style reminiscent of Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, the unique vernacular often referred to as “Mamet-Speak.”

Also present but silent in the play’s opening scene is Susan (Kerry Washington), an associate at the firm.  She stays on a platform that stretches the length of the stage, upstage of the action.  She is always seen, observing but remaining silent.  We notice her, but we don’t focus on her.  Her mere presence (as well as the fact that she is a beautiful black woman and the plot centers on the rape of a young black woman) is a clear indication that she will play a pivotal role in the scenes that follow, and she does.

Yes, “Race” is about a rape trial.  And yes, race plays a factor in the case.  And yes, the race of the characters on stage serves as texture, tension and explosive material for the plot’s development.  But, the real over-riding subject of this play is Political Correctness and the destruction of our society because of it.

Guilt or innocence is rarely discussed by the attorneys in the context of the facts of the case or the strategy in defending their client.  They cynically attempt to navigate the politically volatile waters they find themselves in.  A major piece of evidence in the case is a twenty-year-old postcard written by the accused man which contains inflammatory language about black women.  This is held up as more critical to proving his guilt as a rapist than any physical evidence at the scene of the crime.  It is taken as a given that a rich white man who appears to hold a prejudice against black women will be assumed to be guilty of this heinous crime.  Thus, political correctness replaces jurisprudence and the constitutional presumption of innocence. 

Welcome to the Politically Correct world we inhabit.

And this is the world Mamet wants to expose.  Ever since his landmark play “Oleanna” which was written in the wake of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the playwright has been at his best when he shows us the roaches that live behind America’s proverbial refrigerator but only scatter when he shines his flashlight on them.

Mr. Spader and Mr. Grier are a stunning tandem.  Not since Ron Silver and Joe Mantegna delivered Mamet’s dialogue in mesmerizing cadences in the original Speed-the-Plow have two actors so expertly conveyed his style and message.   Hearing Mr. Spader’s terrific stage voice articulating the unmistakable Mamet style in an intimate, live setting is truly a treat, and I drank up every word.  And in a break-out performance, Mr. Grier proves that he is a force to be reckoned with on the Broadway stage.  He has already shown audiences his comedic and musical abilities, but now he commands attention as a dramatic leading man.  Unfortunately for the audience we have to wait too long for the two of them to be alone on stage for a lengthy and pivotal scene.  We want more of the two of them and, unfortunately, less of Ms. Washington.

Ms. Washington is most often paired with Mr. Spader for the bulk of her scenes and the match-up just isn’t fair.  Mr. Spader possesses a mesmerizing and powerful voice that fills the Barrymore (seemingly unassisted by electronic amplification).  Ms. Washington does not possess such a voice.  And when her character must express intensity or anger she resorts to a painfully strained vocal style which distracts from the actual text and just sounds shrill.

The crime is that the Ms. Washington’s performance has led some critics to lazily assume that her character is weak, thus buying into the latest trend of accusing Mr. Mamet of hating women (gee, I don’t know why he seems to want to rail against political correctness so much).  But, the fact is Ms. Washington’s character is actually one of the strongest female roles written for a young, black actress in a very long time.

Mr. Thomas serves his character and the play admirably in a role that is essential to the plot, but not really important to the message.  Thus his efforts are respected, but not what you leave the theatre humming.

Mr. Mamet also deserves praise for his no-nonsense directing style.  He allows the audience to see the action without distraction we too often get from directors trying to remind you that they are there.  The staging is straight-forward and simple and does what it is supposed to do; serve the text and the actors, nothing more.

The set is handsomely executed with what I believe to be either a planned bit of symbolism, or a remarkable accident.  Stretching across the entire stage, upstage of the action is an enormous set of bookcases filled to the brim with law books of all sorts.  They loom over the play at all times.  Every scene has them as its backdrop.  You can’t escape looking at them.  And yet, in this play presented as a legal drama, set in a law office, with lawyers debating about the guilt or innocence of their client, not one of the law books is ever touched.

In Mamet’s view of American law, the actual law is not merely as important as the new, unforgiving rules of political correctness.  Go, David, Go!