Capping a holiday season political spectacle that featured enough high and low notes for a Broadway musical, the GOP-run House voted final approval for the measure by 257-167 late Tuesday.
—Associated Press, 2 Jan. 2012
Wrong theater metaphor, AP.
If our elected senators and congresspeople gave more funding, or paid more attention to, the arts, they would realize that cliffhanger melodrama plots went out of style nearly a century ago.
These last-minute saves when old men stay up until 2 a.m. so that the country can all go “Wheewww” are old hat. They don’t even work in blockbuster movies anymore. The only major criticisms I heard of this year’s Batman and James Bond flicks was their last-second timebomb-countdown moments. Too over-the-top. Unnecessary. Let’s rave about all the naturalism and emotional content in those films instead.
The tax negotiations that ended last night were, and started so many news cycles ago that it became ridiculous, were such an obvious cliffhanger-waiting(-and-waiting-and-waiting)-to-happen that it even had “cliff” in its title. The other melodrama vocabulary word bandied about while teetering precipitously on the fiscal cliff: brinksmanship. Only we don’t get a sword duel on the edge of a chasm. We get stubborn oafs up who have to stay past their bedtime because they haven’t finished their homework.
If these elected officials were to plan their worklife wisely, stay home with their families for the holidays, go to the office in the daytimes and make sure that any potential hang-ups in any deals were dealt with safely ahead of time, they might have time to go out to the theater.
There, they would learn that twirly-mustached villains—who’ll drive up costs for poor middle-class families and send starving waifs out onto the streets because they can’t afford the tax hikes—have long gone out of style. They could see things like Clybourne Park (coming this spring to the Long Wharf), which among other things is about urban housing concerns and a changing America. They could see revivals of A Raisin in the Sun (like the one which just happened at Westport Country Playhouse), which dramatizes the hopes and dreams of the hardworking and disenfranchised—a play which changed the face of drama, and melodrama, in the 1950s by creating new archetypal characters to replace those overused peril-laden paupers of yore. They could see historical dramas like David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette (in its Yale Rep/ART world premiere production just a few months ago) which questions the very nature of government, and shows that people’s uprisings can be more articulate and sensible than the self-protective posturings of the ruling class.
The President of the United States has a nickname dating back to his earliest political campaigns: “No Drama Obama.” But even he sees that the theatricality of these moments are too tempting for those which more pronounced dramatic urges.
In a speech last night, after the House of Representatives finally approved a bill that could have been decided with much less bleariness days or weeks or months or even years ago, No Drama Obama became a theater director for a moment, giving notes to an cast that lost the plot of the piece and had descended into crass overacting.
The president/dramaturg suggested “seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinksmanship (and) not scare the heck out of folks quite as much.”