Word: garson
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MacBird! by Barbara Garson has been awaited with all the fierce anticipatory noises surrounding a tumbrel arriving at the guillotine. Long before the play's off-Broadway opening last week, an honor guard of coterie intellectuals, including Critic Dwight Macdonald and Yale Drama School Dean Robert Brustein, went into tub-thumping ecstasy over MacBird, which promised a dramatic severing of President Johnson's head. In addition, it capitalized emotionally on a winter of public discontent with L.B.J.-the poll-recorded loss of favor with the electorate, the supposed credibility gap, concern about Viet Nam, Johnson's embroilment...
After viewing Playwright Garson's pennywhistle jeremiad, most theatergoers may conclude that its literary advocates could double as circus shills...
Playwright Garson's conceit is to parody and paraphrase Macbeth; President Johnson is represented in the title role and Mrs. Johnson is Lady Macbeth. King Duncan, renamed John Ken O'Dunc, is clearly President Kennedy, and Duncan's sons become Bobby and Teddy. Nothing loath to be malicious, Garson argues that MacBird (Stacy Keach) lures John Ken O'Dunc to his Texas ranch and arranges his assassination in order to become king, while his henchmen sabotage Teddy Ken O'Dunc's airplane. In hand-to-hand combat with Bobby Ken O'Dunc, MacBird...
...there no offense in it?" King Claudius might ask. Despite MacBird's slanderous premise, the answer is: amazingly little. Playwright Garson fuzzes up the key event to the point that it cannot be taken seriously as an intimation of reality. Shots are heard, but MacBird, unlike Macbeth, is never seen with the murder weapon; nothing really connects him with the crime, except a panting desire for advancement and a few veiled hints and innuendoes...
...which it plans to open in November. It presents the President and Lady Bird as latter-day Macbeths, murdering anyone who gets in their way, opposing "the Wayne of Morse," and chattering in very blank verse. Heaved together by a 25-year-old former Berkeley student named Barbara Garson, the play and its message are exemplified in Macbeth's lines to his chief of war, Lord MacNamara...