Media:
McConnell, Frank
So what's the problem? MEDIA The problem is the Reverend...
...last long denunciatory speech by Jesus H. Christ, a speech And we read those two-literally-appalling books, the which Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif...
...With luck and talent (and God knoweth the show has alotta that) it may be that great...
...But it's retits...
...Answer: Yes, not just beCaruso) confronts his older, alcoholic, and slipping partner, cause it is a great show, but because a number of areas in the Andy Sefowitz (Dennis Franz) in a bar...
...Her last long speech, which for all NEGATION FIGURES its vernacular eloquence begins to sound too overtly didacWELLMAN'S 'SINCERITY' tic, is saved by a last Wellman twist...
...As she exits, presumably leaving them stunned and enlightened, one of the characters, still mirror-obsessed, not doubting in whose image God was created, says, "Who was that AfricanMac Wellman is one of the most elusive and American woman...
...Its first New York production, and even the furballs find themselves succumbing to protesby the late lamented BACA Downtown in Brooklyn, picked tations of sincerity...
...Law," stopping, great acting...
...fectly captures the massive, sudden loneliness, and Now since Newsweek, Time, and all those other secular, glossy metaphysical finality of Urbs Americana...
...An AFA protest takes this form: the protests of the Religious Right (a term to if you run this show, we, all 400,000 of us, will stop watchwhich we shall return...
...Don't the AFA soldiers know how to tell their kids to go to bed...
...Here he uses two styles: the brooff-Broadway listings and move quickly midic everyday language of the high schoolers, a mixture of before the productions fold their tents and quietly fade away...
...invade one another...
...NYPD Blue" is wonderful, moving, human stuff...
...But, like every work of art from Hamlet to "Garfield," it's just a work of art...
...This Steven Bochco must be, at this moment, one of the happiest is a familiar Wellman theme, voiced in various imaginative guys in the world: not only because he's brought forth yet one conceits-a conviction of what, as Jesus H. Christ says, "a/sorry more splendid demonstration of how good TV can be, but be- place this world is, what with all the jive/ass bullslinging, cause he's summoned forth the ideal, thin-lipped and school- and endless justifying...
...In an thing-let's get a.few things very straight...
...Wellman a playwrighting grant, asked him to remove NEA Wer weisst...
...Unlike "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A...
...credit from the play which, with typical graciousness, he As a second-rank detective writer, I'm covered with envy at did, adding a note to the script saying that the play "was not the thing: it's the way a big city feels, and it's the way it feels made possible by the generous assistance of the NEA...
...Ever since Plato, in The Republic, banished 20: 8 October 1993 Commonweal poets because they were immoral liars, the smug, madden- Yearbook, 1990-91...
...Donald Wildmon lives in Tupelo, Mississippi-where Elvis SMART, HIP & REAL was born...
...In the first episode, one guy-Franz-gets shot, and much of the show is scarily about what it really means to take some bullets, in a way that should trouble, more than anybody else, the NRA...
...As Auden "The following program is intended for mature audiences, but wrote, "poetry causes nothing," and that's its glory as well we're aware of the reality of the situation, so you can watch too...
...called "a Iliad and the Bible, and we still come away from their gore four-letter version of the Sermon on the Mount...
...chic struggles of two guys trying to make sense of their lives in the urban tangle where we all, after all, live...
...FRANK MCCONNELL ence of "Two Mystic Furballs of the Tribe of Abadddon and Belial," negation figures...
...Haven't they discovered the great, radiant secret of the TV set-that it has an OFF button...
...their ignorance and their dangerous narrowmindedness...
...the big-city ambiance per- maximus, over "NYPD Blue...
...he called the play "yet another NEA outhibits the ability to use storytelling as a tool for living, that rage...
...Answer: No...
...doesn't know about...
...And it will, I hope, survive the initial flak generated by The immediate point of Sincerity Forever is that the charWildmon and his brethren of the AFA...
...The show itself is about as good as TV can get...
...early scene in the first episode, Detective John Kelly (David First: Is "NYPD Blue" Important...
...front from the beginning-brilliant...
...The play consists primarily of "dedicated to expanding the ambition and scope of non- two-character scenes, school chums or couples talking in a commercial contemporary theater...
...And there's, okay, some nudity and some language, as Aunt Hester used to say: nothing that your average six-year-old from Chicago or, for that matter, Mayberry R.F.D...
...The National Endowment for the Arts, which had given blocks the sense of metaphor...
...It is-let's get this out ing your station and buying products from your advertisers...
...Obscene phrases from the furballs turn Critics Association (ATCA) as one of the outstanding new up in otherwise innocuous exchanges among the teen-agers, plays of the 1990-91 season...
...Steven Bochco's new series, "NYPD Blue," is Wildmon's thought police have protested "Soap," "Maude," by now running on ABC-or at least all but fifty- "Hill Street Blues," "Married-With Children," "L.A...
...and the dialogue-here I speak stores to be signed by people who haven't even seen the with professional envy-is to kill to be able to write...
...And Fourth: Don't We All Have Better Things To Do...
...Or maybe it will thrive acters, who are at once high-school students and members of because of that...
...Surely, no TV premiere in recent years has got- the Invisible Nation (they wear KKK-style costumes that unten this much media attention: Wildmon's wildmen have made fortunately make them look like the Coneheads), readily prosure that everybody who could watch the first episode would claim their own sincerity and see it as a virtue which validates watch the first episode...
...He plays verbal Theatre Project, a new company which describes itself as tricks within the two styles...
...Despite the original critical realien environment...
...most impressive playwrights in America...
...up two Obies and a citation from Mel Gussow in his Off- It is a rich and challenging Wellman brew...
...There is never any doubt that Wellman's plays are about A playgoer who wants to see what he is something in the most serious sense of aboutness, but the mark up to has to keep a sharp eye out for off- of his work is his language...
...As the play goes on, the conversations begin to territory...
...That volume, as the series regularly ingly normal self-righteous have been trying to insist that does with ATCA choices, printed a sample of the play, the this sort of thing is bad, perverting, soul-destructive for you...
...Not a bad and chaos the better for having been there...
...Christ, who in this production is a STAGE black woman (a black man when the play was first done), has come to drive out the furballs and to denounce the insularity of the characters...
...And Sefowitz me about that, just because Wildmon & Co...
...Off-Broadway roundup in The Applause/Best Plays Theater GERALD WEALES Commonweal 8 October 1993: 21...
...One fatuous scene between a boy and When Sincerity Forever first appeared at the Berkshire girl is redone word-for-word with two boys and takes on a Theatre Festival in 1990, it was cited by the American Theatre totally different tone...
...When's the last time country are not even going to get the option of disagreeing with you tried to go on the wagon...
...the only word-spits, "When's the last time you tried to grow Second: Is The Show That Great...
...the plotting is in- weeklies have also blazoned the AFAI"NYPD" brouhahatricate and, for all its intricacy, convincing and rich with there've been petitions against its "pornography" in local drugpromise for future development...
...Wildmon is the founder of the American Family BOCHCO'S 'NYPD BLUE' Association, which claims, as of 1991, 400,000 members nationwide, and whose burning mission is to monitor and then protest excessive violence, profanity, and nudity-I hope I've got the hierarchy right-on TV...
...Answer: Here as so often the Religious Right is actually the Religious Wrong...
...have already made (Franz, than whom perhaps no actor working is better at mim- the choice and found station managers weak-livered enough in ing existential self-loathing) rounds on his partner and-it's those venues to go along...
...Maybe-I'm not description, but the self-styled legislative moralist did not mean kidding here-there's some kind of recessive gene that in- it as a compliment...
...I don't to try to live in, and make a human life in, that surprisingly know what I was thinking...
...as its limitation...
...dating gossip and philosophic maundering, and the vital, viSincerity Forever was recently and briefly back in New York olent, obscene diatribes of the furballs, denunciatory catain a reasonably effective production by the Nevermore logues that become a kind of demented poetry...
...Law," seven or so ABC affiliates who've caved in to and God knows what else...
...I'm not kidding here: it's an instant of heart- membered dignity...
...That sounds like Wellman parked car...
...duction...
...The camera work is cut- And, of course, they've been doing the same thing, with hypus ting-edge sophisticated and hip...
...MEDIA The problem is the Reverend Donald Wildmon...
...Third: Is It Pornographic and Hyperviolent...
...And that, in its bitter charity, is just this Bochco vehicle promises to be an exploration of the psyhow good "NYPD Blue" was throughout its first episode...
...Nine words, folks: the right nine words and, as deliv- ally, really good...
...I hope it runs forever...
...Their sincerity speeches, full of marish adversary to make his grand show look even better than American optimism, are invaded and subverted by the presit really is...
...Answer: Oh, Yeah...
...asks Kelly...
...Caruso and Franz are a perfectly matched pair, ered by the extraordinary Franz, much better than a truck- the first young and on his way up but already separated from load of books on the desperation-and desperate wisdom-of his wife because of the job, the second burned-out and in daily, a drowning drunk who sees with terrible clarity the whirlpool howling despair but still preserving a core of wistfully-rehe's caught in...
...At its center, it's a story about how terribly ception of the play and the whiff of scandal surrounding it, hard we try to love one another, and how terribly hard that is: it had pretty much disappeared until the Nevermore prowhich is, of course, what the big city is all about...
...And the thing airs, nationwide, at 10 P.M...
Vol. 120 • October 1993 • No. 17
