The Washington Post never tires of finding and identifying ultraconservatives. On the front of Sunday’s Arts & Style section was the headline “ENTER, STAGE (FAR) RIGHT: It isn’t at all unusual for Justice Antonin Scalia to be at the center of drama. But actor Edward Gero brings it to a new stage.”
The Post writes routinely of ultraliberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg and barely detects an ideology, let alone someone on the "far left."
If this drill sounds familiar, a play about Scalia, called The Originalist, it might be because the Post shared its delight over it a year ago when it was first announced. Post drama critic Nelson Pressley explained:
Audiences will make their own comparisons — except for those who flat-out can’t abide Scalia. Strand already knows of people who won’t see the play because they so fervently disagree with Scalia’s staunchly conservative public stances.
“I’m looking forward to getting hate mail on both sides,” Gero deadpans. He calls the mere prospect of a Scalia play “a Rorschach test” because whenever people react to the justice’s name, “I immediately know what side of the political spectrum they’re on. Immediately.”
That, says Strand, is at least part of what he’s up to in this premiere that’s been in development at Arena for more than a year. “The failure of a civil discourse and the lack of a middle is an issue I’m concerned about,” Strand says. “Scalia allows us to explore it in a way I hope is entertaining.”
Middle, schmiddle. The playwright clearly brings an aggressive liberal bias to the stage:
This isn’t entirely new terrain for Strand, whose works include a Reagan-era update of Molière’s The Misanthrope for Arena and the shenanigan-filled Three Nights in Tehran in 1996 at Signature Theatre. Three Nights rendered Oliver North’s arms-for-hostages gambit as sheer farce, which is not where Strand is heading here. “I never set out to mock Scalia or do a hatchet job on him,” Strand says.
Pressley reported "Washington audiences had two chances to see Gero as an antic Richard Nixon in Nixon’s Nixon, a comic fantasy of the disgraced president’s final hours in office." And he's played Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
For his part, Scalia had lunch with Gero so the actor could get to know him, and it's unknown whether he'll see the play. But he decided not to talk with the Post as they entered....stage "far Left."
PS: Speaking of SCOTUS and the far left, has anyone pinged Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes about just forwarding the term "SCOTUS Kremlinology"? The U.S. Supreme Court isn't exactly the Politburo.
