Conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia has enough brio in his opinions that it’s inspiring theatrical satire. On the front of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal was a story headlined “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Scalia? Set His Dissents to Music.”
Supreme Court reporter Jess Bravin reports “Justice Scalias are appearing in a stage play, an opera and a puppet show, to name three.”
In real life, Justice Scalia usually delights conservatives and vexes liberals, a tension that plays prominently in the theatrical works.
“Antonin Scalia is in a class by himself,” said playwright John Strand, whose drama, “The Originalist,” is set to open in March at Washington’s Arena Stage. While hesitating to call him a tragic hero, Mr. Strand likens the 1986 Reagan appointee to King Lear or Richard III, Shakespearean characters of grand and sometimes frustrated ambitions.
Derrick Wang’s comic opera “Scalia/Ginsburg” uses actual quotes from the opinions put to recognizable melodies:
“Though you are all aligned/In your decision to flout this,/The Constitution says/Absolutely nothing about this,” Justice Scalia sings, with a line taken from his dissent in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a 1992 decision upholding abortion rights.
For counterpoint, Mr. Wang employs Justice Scalia’s courtroom adversary—and real-world friend—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She crashes through a glass ceiling onto the stage where she confronts Justice Scalia with her concept of a living Constitution.
“How many times must I tell you,/Dear Mister Justice Scalia:/You’d spare us such pain/If you’d just entertain/This idea…” she says.
“Oh, Ruth, can you read?/You’re aware of the text,/Yet so proudly you’ve failed to derive its true/meaning,” Justice Scalia responds, to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The puppet show is called “The Complete History of Comedy,” with justices portrayed as Muppet-like puppets:
It quickly devolves into a satire of Justice Scalia, whose obsession in the scene with gay marriage flusters his colleagues.
“How do you solve a problem like Scalia?/How can you read his mind and pin it down?” they sing to the tune of “Maria,” from “The Sound of Music.”
Justice Scalia is “a maddening figure to those of us who don’t agree with him,” says writer-performer Austin Tichenor. But he’s “also so cartoony that he’s great for comedy, which is a lovely gift and I thank him for that.”
Opera and stage director Peter Sellars says Justice Scalia’s character needs little embellishment.
With his “bluster and almost vindictive level of wit and self-satisfaction,” Justice Scalia already is “very close to Bartolo in ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ ” said Mr. Sellars, a professor of world arts and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And you want to hate him, and it turns out in Act III that he’s your dad.”
At National Review Online, Ed Whelan noted that Bravin asked him for a conservative view of this phenomenon:
Bravin kindly provided me excerpts of each to review and includes my negative assessment:
"If you want to understand Scalia, this is a bad place to start. If you want a good night on the town, surely you can find better options."
Reviewing my notes, I see that I found the stage play, “The Originalist,” and the puppet show, “The Complete History of Comedy (abridged),” to be inane and incompetent in their treatment of legal issues. The opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, struck me as more intelligent. (Again, I reviewed only excerpts of each.)
Bravin noted selections from “Scalia/Ginsburg” have been performed at the Supreme Court. “I thought it was fun,” Justice Scalia said. "He and Justice Ginsburg, both opera cognoscenti, wrote prefaces for a forthcoming publication of the libretto."
