Peter Marks

More Weiners on Display? WaPo Praises Play Named 'Booty Candy'

By Tim Graham | June 09, 2011 | 13:34

Someone in Washington has staged a play on being black and gay titled “Booty Candy,” and unsurprisingly, Washington Post drama critic Peter Marks is there to provide the blurb: “Funny, smutty, and on the whole, enticingly subversive.” The Post picture showed a black male preacher in glittery drag in front of a cross.

What Marks fails to reveal in this review: frontal male nudity on stage, a display of the show’s title, apparently. Anthony Weiner should be envious. The blog The Education of Jarvis Slacks appreciated the cultural education:

WaPo Reviewer Praises 'Raunchily Audacious' Drag Queen Group's 'Oy Vey In a Manger'

By Ken Shepherd | December 22, 2010 | 12:58

On today's Style section front page, Washington Post theater reviewer Peter Marks gave unqualified praise for "Oy Vey In a Manger," a production at the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. that features irreverent parodies of traditional Christmas and Chanukah songs in a ribald fashion:

Don they now their gay apparel! In an ecumenical display of wicked joie de vivre, the Kinsey Sicks are sending up everything that's holy in "Oy Vey in a Manger," a raunchily audacious declaration that nothing about the holidays is sacred.

If you haven't made the acquaintance of the Kinsey Sicks, it's high time you did. (Warning: for immature mature audiences only.) They're at Theater J through Jan. 2, and while other festive events may be decked out in red and green, theirs is of a bluer variety.

It's all good, the humor is equal-opportunity, offensive to Jews and Christians, Marks approvingly writes:

Former WaPo Staffer Cooks Up Molly Ivins Tribute Show for Kathleen Turner

By Tim Graham | March 23, 2010 | 06:45

Kathleen Turner is starring on stage in Philadelphia as the leftist writer Molly Ivins, and The Washington Post promoted the show on Sunday -- and noted that one of the Ivins-adoring playwrights was a former Post staffer:

"Red-Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins" is a 75-minute foray into the psyche of a sassy commentator perhaps most celebrated for a single word: "Shrub," the withering nickname she gave to George W. Bush, a politician who symbolized for her all that seemed wacky in the reward system of American politics.

Written by a pair of newspaperwomen -- Bethesda-based Margaret Engel, a former Washington Post staffer, and her twin sister Allison, communications director at the University of Southern California -- the play styles Ivins as a live-wire wit who, in her profane, folksy way juiced up the public discourse. (You may recall that the first of her books was titled, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?") And she accomplished this from a perspective honed far from the Beltway.

Profane Palin Hate, Unfit for Publication? WaPo 'Washes In Most Happily'

By Tim Graham | September 12, 2008 | 08:18

The Washington Post takes up anger-spewing leftist Sandra Bernhard Friday, and explains the sheer joy of watching her unload venom on Sarah Palin. Theatre reviewer Peter Marks began his review on the front page of the Style section: "No one does angry funnier than Sandra Bernhard. So when she turns her chainsaw wrath on the Republicans' new media magnet, Sarah Palin, the trash talk is so witheringly foul it feels as if it's been fired in a furnace of pure, unadulterated rage."

She also promised the Post she'd call Cindy McCain a "Barbie doll hooker." Is Bernhard truly the funniest with an "acid reflex," as the headline quipped? From the one example Marks provided, someone who doesn’t reflexively hate Gov. Palin might beg to differ:

Washington Post Praises 'Mass Derision' of Conservatives

By Tim Graham | October 10, 2006 | 06:37

In Tuesday's Washington Post, Peter Marks praises "Get Your War On," a left-wing comedy performance at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Unsurprisingly, the critic from the liberal paper finds invective is a lovely thing, if applied to conservatives: