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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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A Second Look at Third Wendy Wasserstein’s new play about academia, Third, gets a negative but sympathetic review in today’s New York Times. (UD mentioned this play earlier, here.) Though I’ve not yet seen it, and given this review probably won’t, the play sounds as though it’s trying to express important ideas about the culture of universities in America today. Like Doris Lessing’s novel, The Golden Notebook, Third seems most interested in the process by which committed people of the left become disillusioned, or realize the limitations of their worldview. The play, writes Ben Brantley, “dares to wonder if liberals now require a few lessons in tolerance… Ms. Wasserstein is politely asking audiences who have grown older with her to acknowledge… the possibility that they might be wrong on subjects they were once sure about.” In particular, Wasserstein goes after the clueless moral strutting of humanities professors. Her main character’s a self-satisfied and superficial woman who announces to her Shakespeare seminar, “Rest assured this classroom is a hegemonic-free zone,” and who says to someone of a shared colleague: “How could you have a problem with Rena? She’s a Guggenheim poet.” Confronted with a conservative male student who writes a strikingly good paper about King Lear for her, the professor wrongly accuses him of plagiarism, since she assumes such a person could never produce sensitive and intelligent literary criticism. (The professor's own written work is gender studies crappacino.) A play like this, though not destined for immortality, ought to be part of the self-examination liberals have lately undertaken, as in the recent, much-discussed paper co-written by Elaine Kamarck and William Galston. |