"I just got out of my theatre class and the teacher (Sara Morsey) went into a half hour lecture on how the Satellite is the best source for finding out about what was going on in town. She read parts of Shamrock McShane's article (The Play About the Baby – see: newmoonrising.com) and went on to say that Mr. McShane is a journalistic hero who makes his readers actually think instead of spoon feeding them their news and reviews. She strongly recommended that all her students pick it up this and every month."

– Denise Hank

Oh What Mangled Crud She Wove!

by Shamrock McShane

"Be Warned!" Arline Greer warns us in the January 17 issue of Scene Magazine. "If you’re looking for the answer to what Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby is about, you won’t necessarily find it here."

If you can weave your way through that garbled sentence (And it’s the lead! Why doesn’t somebody at the Sun edit stuff like this?), the good news is: she’s warning us about her own review.

"Albee’s drama," she dribbles on, "is drenched, sopping wet with leakage from the theatre of the absurd. It is provocative, funny, sad, and it may or may not have deep meaning."

There’s an inviting image for you. Makes you think the play could use a package of Depends. And in the next sentence the critic abdicates. The play may or may not have deep meaning, and she just doesn’t know. If there were a merciful and just god, the review would end there. In the absurd world we live in, it goes on.

There follows a lame allusion to Beckett’s Endgame, "It wouldn’t seem a bit odd if the trash cans in Endgame would empty their human contents onto the stage."

My guess is it would seem mighty odd to Beckett and Albee and, oh, just about everybody else involved.

Lauren Caldwell, the play’s director, gets slighting notice in the next paragraph, but disparagement is reserved for Christina Gould, the play’s scenic designer, whose marvelous set is reduced to "three off-center arches in the background."

Fortunately, the Sun has printed a picture of the set alongside the review so you can plainly see the set is dominated by an ornate and four-dimensional picture frame on the scale of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. And it springs to life! Oh, did she leave that out?

I’ll have to ask Lauren if she changed the play from opening night to Saturday’s matinee. (That’s when the Sun reviewer sees the show, can you believe it? That’s why the review never appears in the Sun until the following Friday.) I’m wondering if David Shelton changed his performance to some kind of hip-hop style because the review calls him "the very urban, tongue in cheek Man."

Just a quibble. Of course, she means "urbane" not "urban."

Worst of all, after pleading ignorance as her excuse for not interpreting the play, she interprets the play. She turns it into Old Adam and Eve Visit Young Adam and Eve, which sounds like a job for Mel Brooks, not Albee.

Again, our intrepid Sun reviewer has run the gamut of critical perceptions from A to B.