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Friday, October 14, 2005

The new Wendy Wasserstein play…

…titled Third, sounds intriguing. It’s just starting to be performed in New York (performances are sold out). The play, a fellow blogger writes,

concerns a fictional college professor (Dianne Wiest) -- the author of books such as “Girls Will Be Boys” and a feminist interpretation of “King Lear” as “the girlification of Cordelia” (since Cordelia, unlike her heroic sisters, does not revolt against the patriarchal power structure). The plot revolves around the professor's accusation of plagiarism against her student Woodson Bull III -- a live white male who is “practically a walking red state."



A reviewer says that “The play's mostly gentle satire on the academic life, particularly the gender studies field, is on target, and occasionally hilarious.”


And a reader on the reviewer's site comments:

What I also found sort of brave was Wasserstein's characterization of "biased liberals," of the intellectual bigotry those of the Democratic Party persuasion have against people who don't think like them, who are "bad" because they don't share their liberal politics. For such an obviously left wing writer, she shows wonderful balance, never really skewing the scale toward conservatives, but more or less pointing a finger at liberals who hypocritically judge others …