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By Jack Nichols
Chicago, Illinois—May 30—Starring Alexandra Billings and Greg Louganis, Larry Kramer's Just Say No is a comedy on stage here as the first of the Bailiwick Repertory's "Pride99" series of gay-oriented dramas. Hardly a fortnight before it opened last week, The Advocate had featured the production's principal stars as its cover-duo.
Sadly, however, for playwright Larry Kramer and to a lesser extent the cast, the Chicago Tribune dispatched as its reviewer its Chief Critic, Richard Christiansen. The result was a scathing attack on Kramer's reputation as a script writer. Pointing out that Just Say No had been written in a previous decade, the Tribune headlined its tirade about the comedy: " 'Just Say No' Missing a Prime Ingredient: Laughter." Christiansen complains first that Kramer's stage offering is, in fact, so dull that it induces sleep. Kramer invokes Oscar Wilde, he says, but has "neither the wit nor the style of the master." The Chicago Tribune critic than slashes and burns in high style, calling Kramer's comedy "a loud, nasty dark bedroom farce, worked up to a lather" by its director and "played bravely but futilely by its doomed cast." Alexandra Billings is given high praise as one "who has the makings of a wonderful comic actress" but who, unfortunately, is unable to demonstrate her capabilities within the confines of the Kramer script where, according to Christiansen, " she's reduced to braying and making the most of feeble ripostes." Marc Silva, however, playing a busybody uncle, is credited with holding "the rickety show together." The Tribune's critic sounds a note of alarm describing "the hapless Greg Louganis" who "minces around, often topless" a "sissy boy son Junior, who wants to be a ballet dancer." Christiansen's criticisms extend beyond the script to set design as well, appearing to complain about "a grand staircase and five slamming doors" through which actors and actresses exit and enter at "a mad farcical pace." The comedic leaps in Just Say No find playwright Kramer falling flat, according to an obviously annoyed Christiansen. Kramer's targets have been picked out of the Reagan era around which his script was originally written. The part played by Alexandra Billings —Mrs. Potentate--was modeled to some extent, says the Tribune, after former First Lady, Nancy. Although Chrisiansen admits that Reaganite' hypocrisy about AIDS makes a worthy satirical target, he appears to regret that satire's comedic bite becomes, in Kramer's hands, mere "bile". Therefore the anger that informed Kramer's 80s stage hit about AIDS, The Normal Heart , says Christiansen, is wholly present in Just Say No. "Everybody from Mamie Eisenhower to Calvin Klein gets trashed." Kramer's general approach to his subject matter, however, is called "backstairs gossip gleaned from a quarter-century of tabloid journalism." Over the Memorial Day weekend, Kramer, his attention apparently diverted away from Christiansen's frontal assault, condemned an opinionated book review by John Updike in The New Yorker (May 31). Kramer, who recently re-outed Abraham Lincoln, flailed furiously at Updike's shameless homophobia, quoting the well-known American author's commentaries in scornful tones. " I hope you will read the full review and object as strenuously as I do" Anger, with its accompanying sprays of paralyzing pessimism and its casting of a general pall of near-universal paranoia and unhappiness, flares up in the final paragraph of Kramer's furious weekend screed in which he castigates the scurrilous Updike. He writes: "After reading this review I was overwhelmed, yet again, with that haunting question that never ceases to torture my dreams and motivate my actions: why do they continue to hate us so?" |
