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Jaime Green says:
Both times I saw this play – in previews at Playwrights Horizons and on Broadway – the audience was with the play the whole way through. But I was angry. I was angry because it is frustrating to watch an hour-long frustrating and unproductive argument. And I was angry because this play had convinced so many people that they had just witnessed – taken part in, by witnessing – a real and important conversation about important and difficult issues…
…But it is all an effect. Audiences feel that something dangerous is happening. But nothing ever is.
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Why, it’s the “Point/Counterpoint”approach! How many of those thousands of hours of predictable arguments ever yielded any revelations, actually cast harsh lights upon nasty truths heretofore carefully ignored by the “liberal media”?
And indeed, as your incisive and comprehensively-detailed essay makes clear, that kind of actually unthreatening “feel that something dangerous is happening” is rewarded; by audiences, critics, the Pulitzer Prize judges…
