Waiting for Righty
Waiting for Righty Afew months ago a parent at my kids' school asked me if I wanted to contribute to a piece of Communist propaganda. Well, sort of. Ari directs the theater program at the Jewish...
...But the rule is they are not supposed to say so...
...Besides, Ari's depiction, while vicious, didn't actually hit me at my vulnerable spots (except the water-stealing busi-ness—I am a recovering aquaholic, and I did not abuse water during our lunch...
...The modern stuff Ari added made Odets look subtle...
...All his assurances that my ideas would be fairly presented had been false, and it was clear from his depiction that he was at least mildly contemptuous of me...
...If he finished that book, he's a better man than I. On opening night I went to the theater...
...He's a loud, overbearing jerk...
...neighborhood that is massively liberal, I know that a certain percentage of the people I meet (about 20 percent, I estimate) are disgusted by me on purely partisan grounds...
...In the end I tried to register my complaints to Ari in a tone of calm civility...
...I also gave him an introductory tour through conservative economic thought—of which he was blissfully ignorant...
...The actor who played me was charismatic, and the audience loved it...
...The first rule is you don't screw people you know through your kids...
...The polemical combat zone is not supposed to come near the children...
...Second, there is the code of superficial civility, which he violated...
...He insults the busboy and the waiter...
...My problem came when Ari started leaving friendly messages on my voice mail asking how I liked the play...
...I felt a little sorry for him because the Washington Post savaged his play as a work of well-meaning incompetence—the review was too harsh, even by my standards...
...On the other hand, there were good reasons to be civil...
...Ari directs the theater program at the Jewish Community Center in downtown Washington, and he said he was reviving Waiting for Lefty, the famous agitprop play Clifford Odets wrote in 1935 while a member of the Communist party...
...I've learned a lot about communism since college, and I covered the fall of the Soviet Union, and now I found the party line an impregnable barrier between me and the play (just as few of us could stomach an early Nazi-party play, even if it had nothing to do with the Holocaust...
...He really wanted to present all sides of the issues, he emphasized, to question the leftist drumbeat of the original...
...I tried to explain all this to Ari at lunch...
...He steals other people's water...
...DAVID BROOKS...
...He is cruel and insensitive toward his girlfriend...
...I read all I could about the Group Theater, in New York, where Odets made his creative home, and about Mordecai Gorelik, one of the intellectual forces behind the radical theater...
...The idea was that I'd talk to him and he'd write my views into the script...
...And if they do, as Ari effectively did, they're not supposed to come back and want to be friends again...
...What I think I resent most is the way Ari violated Washington's code of ethics...
...Far from slowing down the general hilarity, this prompted the audience to yelp louder...
...So probably I should have screamed at him...
...And in the middle of the first act there was a scene in which an editor at a conservative magazine is having lunch at a downtown restaurant with his girlfriend...
...I can tell you it's weird to be in the middle of 250 people who are all laughing at a version of you...
...And he delivers an unceasing stream of obnoxious comments about the world—two-thirds of which were vulgarized versions of things I had told Ari...
...In the midst of my self-loathing, I even contemplated taking my kids out of the high-priced private school they now attend and enrolling them in a public school...
...I must have mentioned Joseph Schum-peter at some point, because a few weeks later he told me he'd gone out and gotten a book by Schum-peter and was reading it...
...At one point the character says that members of the Hollywood 10 had supported the Hitler-Stalin pact (at lunch I had mentioned this in regard to a conversation Odets had years later with another former Communist, Elia Kazan...
...Before our lunch I reread Waiting for Lefty, and this time I was disturbed by it...
...Ari said he was adding some new scenes, to be called Still Waiting, and he wanted some "discordant material...
...As a conservative in a D.C...
...Our daughters remain friends...
...At least there the parents wouldn't have such heavy proletarian consciousness...
...Ari's workers were even more victimized and noble, and his bosses were at least as villainous as Odets's...
...And I hated myself afterwards...
...So I had lunch with Ari at a downtown restaurant...
...I was an easy mark for this pitch because in college I went through an intensive Odets phase...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 29
