This is also not a very good play at all.
Here’s the setup…..a head of research institute is farcically driven. He’s got a daughter who wants to eschew college to be an actor and a son who wants to drop out of college and might be a rapist.
David Schwimmer plays the maybe rapist. But it’s ok, you guys, it’s a comedy.
It’s every so slightly better than the other play of hers I read. But it’s not good.
What do you think goes through the mind of an actor when you’re working on a play written by someone who is kind of famous in a certain world and maybe you get told, oh! this National Book Award winning writer, this absolute institution of a writer, has written a series of plays and wants your company to perform them and then you get the script and this is it?
Crap. I imagine.
I can’t tell which way is up and which way is down in this play either. I think she might be making fun of feminists, but maybe not; she might be making fun of college, but maybe not, and she might be making fun of “millenials” a few years before it was cool to do so, but maybe not.
It’s just….blegh. You know? It’s Friday, man, and this is the book I listened to today. You can’t take it back.
I am not at all convinced I have any better read on Joyce Carol Oates as a person or a writer after reading this one.