Word: garson
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...Perhaps Playwright Barbara Garson should be forgiven for the tasteless liberties she has taken in MacBird [March 3]: she has reminded us that we are lucky to be living in a country where such liberties are generously permitted...
...Poor Barbara Garson! Now that the critics have roasted MacBird into a gilt-edged annuity, she will have to reconcile herself to fame and a fat purse. That's a hell of an albatross to hang on a fully committed protester. If that's what...
What's a nice girl like her doing in a place like the theater, anyway? Why isn't she out in the fresh air on an apple-cheeked picket line? As a playwright, Miss Garson is still much closer to Berkeley than Broadway. In trying to whip up a wicked political stew, she has turned out a mere Hasty Pudding...
...consistent tone can be imparted to a play that juxtaposes the somber drum roll of the Kennedy funeral cortege with such inane Shakespearean mutations as "Oh whine and pout/ That ever I was born to bury doubt." But MacBird's basic flaw is that Playwright Garson is a frivolous, scattershot satirist who has no moral vision of her own to counterpose whatever might be regarded as evil in her characters. She has written an apolitical play in which all choices seem silly. The Ken O'Duncs are presented as chilly, ruthless opportunists; MacBird is a mixture of corn...
Another sign of Playwright Garson's ineptitude as a satirist is her determination to testify in the courtroom of drama to so many things she knows to be not true. Her tactic for showing aversion to the Viet Nam war is not to question the logic of that war but to imply that Johnson, like Macbeth, has "supped full with horrors" and is an unfeeling, bloody-minded monster. Unwilling to concede the humanity of others, she reduces her characters to caricatures. They eventually take their revenge by draining MacBird of most of its fun and all of its life...