Hilton Doesn't Welcome You

Over at The New Yorker, Hilton Als reviews Hair and Neil Labute's latest, and finds them wanting. The problem? Racism and sexism.

He doesn't believe in the black characters in the 60s lovefest. I haven't seen the show in a while, but I don't recall anyone in Hair being that three-dimensional.

Als notes it's "[l]ess a musical than a revue, it was meant to showcase those elements of society which the American stage had relegated to the margins: blacks and women." (So all the more ironic--if that's the word--that they fall short in Als' eyes.) When I read this, I stopped for a second. Certainly I can see a case for the American stage relegating blacks to the margins, but women? It's pretty easy to claim sexism was (and is) everywhere in our society, but when I think of all the grand dames who've trod the boards on Broadway, I wonder if this is one place where the catch-all accusation may not apply.

Which brings us to the LaBute play, reasons to be pretty. According to Als, it's lousy with sexism. Here's how he starts his review: "Like racism, sexism hurts. It just does." At first I thought he was trying to be cute, or clever, but no, he just wants us to stop and think about the important point he's making.

LaBute's plays are about men and women who do nasty things to each other. There's a lead character, Kent, who's apparently a sexist jerk. I'm not sure if Als is more bothered by Kent, or how the audience reacts to him:

The women in Kent’s life get turned on by their own moral superiority as much as they do by his slablike fingers slapping their fannies. He’s a cuter Andrew Dice Clay, and, the night I attended the show, women laughed as uproariously at his sexism as they did at Steph’s cluelessness. It’s as if LaBute’s—by now canned and adolescent—“transgressive” point of view were what audiences needed in order to feel anarchic, to shed the boring safety of their lives. Watching women in the audience laugh at Steph’s anger and at Kent’s arrogance is terrifying but predictable. It’s rare that the oppressed don’t identify with their oppressor.

I know how unpleasant it is to have an audience feel freed by art you don't approve of. Nevertheless, if I were a paid critic, I'd probably still review the play, and not the banality of the audience's evil, even if they're so oppressed they don't understand what they're doing.