Well, that’s more or less Louis’s function, and that’s why all the other characters got so exasperated with him.

That’s why the scene with him and Belize is so fucking amazing.

Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you.

I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

And Prior’s monologue with the Angels? amazing

WE WILL BE CITIZENS!

I thought the exact same thing. How nice it must be to have so much cash you’re able to blow some of it just to annoy Amanda!

That is incredibly nasty and harsh. What did Gollum ever do (fictionally) that was anything like as evil as stuff Roy Cohn did in real life?…

My sense in looking at pictures of Cohn is that he’s probably the sort of person I’d find to be both extremely attractive and repellant.

Really? I get kind of a Smeagol vibe off of his picture, but then I’m petty and shallow.

Hahahaha. I hate being lectured, whether it’s my parents, a playwright or a TV show. There’s ways to get political and social ideas across other than using the literary equivalent of a club to do so. I felt like a recipient of a Three Stooges beatdown the entire time I was in the theater.

I also felt insulted, that Kushner didn’t bother with subtlety at all, that he presumed we were all so clueless and uninformed that we *needed* to be lectured. Hey, asswipe playwright, *I* lived through the AIDS catastrophe from the get-go, I didn’t need *you* to yell at me about it. I’ve often felt the plays, despite their absurd “Gay Fantasia On American Themes” subtitle, were written for the Cletus and Brandine’s of this world.

Well, that’s more or less Louis’s function, and that’s why all the other characters got so exasperated with him

That’s fine, but we, the audience, shouldn’t be yearning for him to develop laryngitis so he’ll just shut. the. hell. UP. for the remainder of the play.

Speaking of long plays as I was, one of the best days I’ve spent in the theater was watching the two-part adaptation of the Cider House Rules that played here in Los Angeles at the Taper. It helped that I loved the book and the movie, but the time flew by watching it.

Henry Holland
September 1, 2007 at 12:59 am

I might have to return the toaster I got when I joined The Homosexual Agenda for typing this, but I must:

I thought AiA was utterly ghastly. I saw both parts one Saturday back in the 90’s and by the end of it, I was wondering what I’d done in a past life to justify the hell I was being put through. I’ve been to hundreds of plays in my life and I’ve never been through something as excruciating at the appalling Oldest Living Bolshevik scene.

Dang, that’s one of my favorite bits (left out of the HBO version of course). Well, someone listed A Scanner Darkly as their least favorite movie in Pam’s recent thread, and I thought it was a work of genius, so it takes all kinds I guess.

Kushner didn’t write a play, he wrote pre-blog blog rants with all the theatricality of paint drying.

You say that like it’s a bad thing!

By the end of the first part, I flinched every time the character of Louis came on stage, because I knew we were going to be subjected to another banal, deeply tedious political harangue.

Well, that’s more or less Louis’s function, and that’s why all the other characters got so exasperated with him.

Naturally I identified with him, much to my mortification.

I thought AiA was utterly ghastly. I saw both parts one Saturday back in the 90’s and by the end of it, I was wondering what I’d done in a past life to justify the hell I was being put through. I’ve been to hundreds of plays in my life and I’ve never been through something as excruciating at the appalling Oldest Living Bolshevik scene. Kushner didn’t write a play, he wrote pre-blog blog rants with all the theatricality of paint drying. By the end of the first part, I flinched every time the character of Louis came on stage, because I knew we were going to be subjected to another banal, deeply tedious political harangue.

The one moment where the play started coming alive for me was when the Angel was about to burst through Prior’s roof. Which Kushner then promptly undermined by having Prior turn to address the audience and say something like “It’s like a Spielberg movie, isn’t it”. Awful. He finally gets some theatrical momentum going and….he goes for a cheap, shitty joke.

I had no problem with the fact it was so long (I’m a big fan of Wagner’s operas) but it could have easily been pruned down in to a 2 - 2 1/2 hour play. The Normal Heart covered some of the same ground and said it’s piece in a quarter of the time.

David Marshall Grant sure was sexy as Joe Pitt, though.

Recorder Julie Haggerty said the instruction came from the county attorney’s office after Judge Robert Hanson…

It’s good to know she’s still getting work after Airplane!.

And well, all things being equal, I’d do All Pacino in a heartbeat. Assuming that he was all down with being in an out and open relationship with a man.

When The Insider was being filmed in Louisville, a friend of mine worked as an on-set paramedic (in case, you know, someone got all mauled during a stunt). She came back from her first day on the set and said, “Three things most people don’t know about Al Pacino: he’s really short, wears an extremely fake-looking toupee, and smells really, really bad.” Just thought I’d throw that out there.