Liberals love to hate Rupert Murdoch. The federally funded Kennedy Center in D.C. even imported an Australian play that fervently imagines Murdoch’s powerful life on stage. Andrew Beaujon at Poynter Media Wire reported at the Thursday performance he attended, “applause broke out on my right and left when one character criticized Republicans.”
For all of the ardor liberals muster against Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers and Fox News and their grasp of the facts, is it surprising that this play doesn’t restrict itself to the facts? Director Lee Lewis explained the play is a “fantasia” against the right-leaning media baron:
Peter Marks
By Tim Graham | March 17, 2014 | 3:02 PM EDT
By Tim Graham | February 28, 2014 | 5:27 PM EST
Washington Post drama writer Peter Marks reported Thursday that the Arena Stage company, known in recent years for putting on Kathleen Turner honoring a leftist in “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” will stage the world premiere of a three-actor drama in which the main character is conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
“The Originalist,” by D.C. playwright John Strand, is slated for its premiere on March 6, 2015, and will star Edward Gero , known for, among other roles, playing “Scrooge in Ford’s Theatre’s annual ‘A Christmas Carol’ — as the politically conservative justice.” Marks used the C-word for Scalia, but couldn't manage the L-words for Ivins.
By Tim Graham | March 25, 2012 | 6:09 PM EDT
Mike Daisey shamelessly lied about Apple's abuse of factory workers in China on stage, which was then picked up by the trendy public-radio show "This American Life," which airs on many NPR stations. It caused a black eye for NPR (by their one-degree association), but The Washington Post has proclaimed Daisey's "voice" is too important to shame off the stage.
Post theatre critic Peter Marks announced Sunday that "after days of wrestling with what’s been found to be Daisey’s dysfunctional relationship with candor, when I have felt angry and a bit betrayed — you put your own reputation on the line when you embrace someone else’s in a review — I’ve settled on a sense of solidarity with Shalwitz." That's Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of Washington's Woolly Mammoth theater, which plans to put "dysfunctional" Daisey back in the spotlight.
By Tim Graham | June 9, 2011 | 2:34 PM EDT
Someone in Washington has staged a play on being black and gay titled “Booty Candy,” and unsurprisingly, Washington Post drama critic Peter Marks is there to provide the blurb: “Funny, smutty, and on the whole, enticingly subversive.” The Post picture showed a black male preacher in glittery drag in front of a cross.
What Marks fails to reveal in this review: frontal male nudity on stage, a display of the show’s title, apparently. Anthony Weiner should be envious. The blog The Education of Jarvis Slacks appreciated the cultural education:
By Ken Shepherd | December 22, 2010 | 12:58 PM EST
On today's Style section front page, Washington Post theater reviewer Peter Marks gave unqualified praise for "Oy Vey In a Manger," a production at the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. that features irreverent parodies of traditional Christmas and Chanukah songs in a ribald fashion:
Don they now their gay apparel! In an ecumenical display of wicked joie de vivre, the Kinsey Sicks are sending up everything that's holy in "Oy Vey in a Manger," a raunchily audacious declaration that nothing about the holidays is sacred.
If you haven't made the acquaintance of the Kinsey Sicks, it's high time you did. (Warning: for immature mature audiences only.) They're at Theater J through Jan. 2, and while other festive events may be decked out in red and green, theirs is of a bluer variety.
It's all good, the humor is equal-opportunity, offensive to Jews and Christians, Marks approvingly writes:
By Tim Graham | March 23, 2010 | 7:45 AM EDT
Kathleen Turner is starring on stage in Philadelphia as the leftist writer Molly Ivins, and The Washington Post promoted the show on Sunday -- and noted that one of the Ivins-adoring playwrights was a former Post staffer:
"Red-Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins" is a 75-minute foray into the psyche of a sassy commentator perhaps most celebrated for a single word: "Shrub," the withering nickname she gave to George W. Bush, a politician who symbolized for her all that seemed wacky in the reward system of American politics.
Written by a pair of newspaperwomen -- Bethesda-based Margaret Engel, a former Washington Post staffer, and her twin sister Allison, communications director at the University of Southern California -- the play styles Ivins as a live-wire wit who, in her profane, folksy way juiced up the public discourse. (You may recall that the first of her books was titled, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?") And she accomplished this from a perspective honed far from the Beltway.
By Tim Graham | September 12, 2008 | 9:18 AM EDT
The Washington Post takes up anger-spewing leftist Sandra Bernhard Friday, and explains the sheer joy of watching her unload venom on Sarah Palin. Theatre reviewer Peter Marks began his review on the front page of the Style section: "No one does angry funnier than Sandra Bernhard.
By Tim Graham | October 10, 2006 | 7:37 AM EDT
In Tuesday's Washington Post, Peter Marks praises "Get Your War On," a left-wing comedy performance at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Unsurprisingly, the critic from the liberal paper finds invective is a lovely thing, if applied to conservatives: