And I'll be far shallower, landing on one point in my craw: Do we really have to end up divided into an "Inheritance" camp or one for "Slave Play"? As if these two pieces -- both written by LGBTQ men of color -- offer a binary choice for aesthetics, relevance, audience investment, and ambition? Ambition in writing or producing? I saw both, had issues with both, though one more than the other (and spent a night at a bar with a female playwright of color, who was so put off by "Slave Play" she wrote the playwright; it isn't all white guilt or white {X}, a facile justification for myriad issues, including the play's repetitiveness and bloat). I hardly saw them as proof for a damned indictment of B'way. I can't get past this type of reductive thesis.
Attendant issue: I have a personal and entirely subjective irritation with those who shame others for their emotional responses to "The Inheritance." If that first half finale -- dismissed rather cruelly in this essay -- moved so many touched by pandemic death in the 80s and 90s, damn, can't we give it that? |
