“Timely” Flops
The other day, a rare and weird sensation drove me into taking a look at a timely play — an exposure, you may have noticed, into which I have to be driven. For timely plays are, in general, as attractive as sauerkraut juice: good for your health, if you want to trust faddist doctors, but an offense to your palate. Theater people, however, are constantly tempted to mess around with “topical urgency” — not so much because they are really concerned with the problems of our day, but because they are habitually terrified by the ancient apprehension that the theater may be dying. And the “timely play” (or so it seems to theater people who, bless them, are congenitally in a state of excited ignorance) may conveniently save the dying theater.
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